Summerhill, founded in the 1920s, is run as a children's democracy under Neill's educational philosophy of self-regulation, where kids choose whether to go to lessons and how they want to live freely without imposing on others.

[5] Hart didn't think Miller's introduction would help the book[5] and approached Margaret Mead, who refused on the grounds of Neill's connection with Reich.

[6] He wrote that Summerhill was one of few schools that provided education without fear or hidden coercion,[7] and that it carried the goals of "the Western humanistic tradition": "reason, love, integrity, and courage".

[13] Neill's "self-regulation" constitutes a child's right to "live freely, without outside authority in things psychic and somatic"—that children eat and come of age when they want, are never hit, and are "always loved and protected".

Neill discarded many kinds of dogma ("discipline, ... direction, ... suggestion, ... moral training, .. religious instruction") and put sole faith in the belief of the innate goodness of children.

[21] Summerhill was included in over 600 American university courses,[19] and a 1969 translation for West Germany (The Theory and Practice of Anti-Authoritarian Education) sold over a million copies in three years.

[22] In the wake of the book's success, publisher Harold Hart started the American Summerhill Society in New York City, of which Paul Goodman was a founding member.

[7] Danica Deutsch (Journal of Individual Psychology) concluded that the school's lessons curbed the child's sense of social responsibility and other society-preserving functions.

[26] Willard W. Hartup (Contemporary Psychology) positioned Neill as closer to a psychotherapist than a teacher, especially as the philosophy undergirding Summerhill "derives from Freud".

[28] Margaret Mead (American Sociological Review) considered the book more of a historical document for later generations to analyze "than anything that can be taken at its face value".

[1] To Mead, Summerhill's moral battles had passed since the 1920s, as Neill's audience already agreed with his views on frank discussions about sex and the primacy of student interest.

[1] Similarly, Crutis (The Times Literary Supplement) noted Neill's approach as less "sensational" in its method than expected, and asserted that 1960s psychologists would agree with the stance to not guilt children for masturbating and to tell the truth about the origin of babies.

[14] R. G. G. Price (Punch) remarked that the school was presented as having little intellectual or aesthetic zeal, and that Neill's statement against teaching algebra to eventual repairmen was "the most shameful sentence ever written by an educational pioneer".

[30] Hartup (Contemporary Psychology) and Harding (New Statesman) saw no evidence towards whether Summerhill students were successful by standards other than Neill's, particularly in academic distinction.

[29][15] The Saturday Review quoted from the British Inspectors report that the school was "unimpressive"—despite laudatory student "will and ... interest, ... their achievements are rather meager.

[32] Vaizey put Neill's Summerhill in a disappearing lineage of post-World War I experimental schools that focused on freedom from directed games, classics curriculum, and prudery.

[11] Crutis (The Times Literary Supplement) thought the book would lead readers to ask why "the principles of progressive education" were not more accepted in England.

[31] Hartup (Contemporary Psychology) thought that the book, while stimulating, left questions as to its actual contribution past an "experiment in applied psychoanalysis", with "clinical procedure ... alternatively inspired, naive, and hair-raising".

[19] (This said, Hartup of Contemporary Psychology said Summerhill was closer to Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality than to Émile and criticized Neill's psychoanalytic overemphases.

[36] Timothy Gray wrote that the book aroused an education reform movement with directives advocated by Herb Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, Neil Postman, and Ivan Illich.

[37] Fifty years after the book was first released, Astra Taylor wrote that the idea of Summerhill selling millions of copies in the 2012 American education climate "seems absurd".