He therefore considered that children who attended Summerhill were likely to emerge with better-developed critical thinking skills and greater self-discipline than children educated in compulsion-based schools. Externally imposed discipline, Neill felt, prevented internal, self-discipline from developing. Neill's Summerhill School experience demonstrated that, free from the coercion of traditional schools, students tended to respond by developing self-motivation, rather than self-indulgence. Pupils have equal voting rights with school staff. The school is also managed democratically, with regular meetings to determine school rules. These included a belief that children learn better when they are not compelled to attend lessons.

In 1921 Neill founded Summerhill School to demonstrate his educational theories in practice. Many of Neill's ideas are widely accepted today, although there are still many more 'traditional' thinkers within the educational establishment who regard Neill's ideas as threatening the existing social order, and are therefore controversial. Neill's ideas, which tried to help children achieve self-determination and encouraged critical thinking rather than blind obedience, were seen as backward, radical, or at best, controversial. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child, was responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood. Neill believed that the happiness of the child should be the paramount consideration in decisions about the child's upbringing, and that this happiness grew from a sense of personal freedom.

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