Rape of the mind. Consult John Taylor Gatto.

She started by picking up a friend who had never spoken French. I think she was born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother/French father and for some reason had never said a word at school or at home even though they spoke French at both places. My kid spoke at her constantly, mostly in English spoken in a French accent and gradually adding in words as she picked them up. Her friend said nothing but played along. Within a month the Vietnamese girl started to speak. The parents were delighted with the teacher, but I think the poor kid finally mustered up the courage to tell mine to shut the fuck up.

Structure matters, but motivation matters more than structure. Get motivated, and you will go out and find or create the right structure. But no motivation, no learning.

I blew off language classes because they weren’t working for me. I didn’t give up learning, though. I just tried different ways.

And the best way to learn a skill is to force yourself to use it.

I also think of anecdotes from teachers I know, about their classrooms full of kids that have zero desire to learn and peer pressure to remain stupid.

I think the bottom line here is that given freedom to do as they please, kids will react to societal expectations, and even then there is tremendous variation between kids. I think this experiment would work great with kids from families and cultures that expect you to lead a productive life, and it would bomb miserably in the inner city, for example.

It has been run into on multiple occasions studying factory productivity and other things, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this were what happened here. The boys in the experiment were having, perhaps for the first time in their lives, attention paid to them. So… Improvements.

Would this “un-schooling” translate well into full-scale use? Don’t know–Some would thrive, others would not.