Harry Elmer Barnes called the book one of the most exciting and challenging in the field of education since Émile. (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.) The psychoanalyst Benjamin Wolstein put Neill's work alongside that of John Dewey, and Sir Herbert Read likened Neill to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Henry Caldwell Cook. David Carr characterized the book as centered on moral education, despite Neill's recurrent insistence on the danger of moral teachings. Scholar Richard Bailey agreed with Carr's characterization.
