I'm all for making school more fun. But self-direction? Don't forget: these are children. Most (and certainly enough) of them won't have any natural inclination to learn even reading, writing and math. The whole point of having schools is to give an external sense of direction.
I think schools need to be optimized and tuned, but please, please stop these extreme experiments.
Having worked with much younger children for several years, I can assure you that most children start of with a natural inclination to learn how to read & understand math, just maybe not in the structured 'worksheet' type approach you see in some schools.
A child that enjoys baking becomes naturally motivated to learn how to understand recipes, a child that is interested in computers & games wants to learn how to recognise the symbols that start their favourite game. It is all about finding the right motivation.
For the even the most reluctant writers it can be about building up the necessary physical skills using less obvious means- lego, clay, eye droppers in the water area. Then instead of practising writing we are making road signs for our car game or writing a list of things to take on our outing.
The point is when young children are given a supportive, no pressure approach that acknowledges & responds to their interests they do have a natural inclination to learn those skills and others. They just need adults that know how to facilitate & scaffold that learning. What is more important- that a child knows how to read by 4 or a child who learns at their own pace, and is far more likely to become someone who loves reading for pleasure?
I couldn't disagree more. My kids are only 2 and 3, but what they've learned has been entirely driven by their own interests. They learned to talk because not being able to communicate well is frustrating. They learned to walk because crawling everywhere is frustrating, etc. Not because I sat them down and said "OK, now it's time for our talking lesson".
Why would this suddenly change? As a parent I think it's still your job to evaluate the things that are positive and negative and try to limit the negative influences, like TV or intentionally addictive video games (farmville, wow, etc.), but I don't see how this is at all related to school. School shouldn't be exempt from being scrutinized for it's positive or negative effects.
When I finished school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. School classes bored the crap out of me for the most part, and not because I'm too smart (which I'm not), but because it just wasn't interesting. I had no practical or immediate use of the material being taught. I use to think I was deficient and had an attention deficit disorder. Occasionally a lesson would interest me and I would excel at it, but soon we'd move on to some other boring topic.
Many years later, looking at my own day to day life, I am constantly learning. The things I learn have either a practical and immediate use, or they simply interest me. Many of the lessons in school I thought were boring would have interested me at some point in my life when they were more relevant.
Children don't necessarily want to learn,they want to do things. And sometimes their lack of knowledge stops them from doing what they want and therefore they become motivated to learn what they need to overcome that. These are other extreme experiments, and self guided learning has been used for quite a while and quite successfully (re montessori)
I think schools need to be optimized and tuned, but please, please stop these extreme experiments.