Neill believed that schooling dominated children and caused repression and trauma.

He wrote several books on his experience, including The Problem Child (1926), The Problem Parent (1932), The Problem Teacher (1939), The Free Child (1953), Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Education (1960), and Freedom, not License (1966). Neill was the headmaster of the school until his death in 1973. Lessons were optional and the everyday life of the school was run according to a long list of rules set by the school assembly, where adults' and children's votes were weighed equally. Free referred to the children's freedom to do what they pleased as long as they did not interfere with the freedom of others. Upon his return to England in 1924 Neill founded Summerhill, a so-called free boarding school that housed sixty children between the ages of five and sixteen. He stayed for some years in Austria and Germany working with followers of Progressive education and Freudianism. For some years he ran the journal of Progressive education, the New Era, together with the theosophist Beatrice Ensor. He published his first books, A Dominie's Log (1915), A Dominie Dismissed (1917), A Dominie in Doubt (1920), and A Dominie Abroad (1923), about the everyday experiences of a Scottish teacher who was permissive and loving and therefore constantly got into trouble. In his youth he worked as a student-teacher, went to the university and to England where he joined the Progressives in their critique of schooling and education. He spent his childhood in a modest home with a stern father and many sisters and brothers in an atmosphere of modified but ever-present Calvinism. Alexander Sutherland Neill was born in Scotland on October 17, 1883, the son of a village schoolteacher.

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