If there's one thing we've established by now, it's that unsolicited instruction doesn't work: * Merrel et al, "How effective are school bullying intervention

If there's one thing we've established by now, it's that unsolicited instruction doesn't work: * Merrel et al, "How effective are school bullying intervention programs?" * Smith et al, "The effectiveness of whole-school antibullying programs". Not to mention all those ant-drug classes they have in America that don't work. It's true for academic subjects too. The declining interest in science as people go through school is well-documented: * Eccles et al, "Negative effects of traditional middle schools on students' motivation", * Harter, "A new self-report scale of intrinsic versus extrinsic orientation in the classroom", * Lepper et al, "Instrinsic and extrinsic motivational orientations in the classroom: Age differences and academic correlates", which, together with this result: Vedder-Weiss and Fortus, "Adolescent's declining motivation to learn science: Inevitable or not?", proves that it's the schooling that's causing it, and not, say, a natural part of growing up: this last paper uses schools that don't teach you anything you don't want to learn (democratic schools). (I think that compulsory, curriculum-based computer programming stuff should be kept out of schools for this reason, too.) Since democratic schools are private schools, you could make the argument that there's a socioeconomic status thing involved, where rich people "are just smarter". I'd counter by saying that homeschoolers don't show any significant variation in academics w.r.t. wealth, and that I don't see any reason why it should be different for democratic schooling, which is practically group homeschooling. > Uneducated about reality, as you would expect at that age People would know more about the real world if they weren't stuck in a building all day.