My interest in homeschooling and for that matter alternative schooling —and I was interested in alternative schools before I became interested in homeschooling. My interest in it is that it makes it at least possible for those people who want to give their children a natural, organic, uncoerced learning experience to do so. Not everybody is going to use it that way. People start schools which they hope will be even more coercive than the schools that exist. There are certainly some people who teach their children thinking that they can pound in learning faster than the local schools who were doing it. I don't think many of them stick it out very long because they find out it doesn't work. … I mean if I look far enough down the line I like to think of schools as learning experiment activity centers. Somewhat analogous to public libraries, but rather wider in scope. Places to which people can come if they feel like coming to do the things that they want to do for as long as they want to do them. … I would hope that somewhere we would find a way to call these places something other than schools. Because they're really very fundamentally very different. …We have to understand we're going to probably have to agree to disagree about this. Because nobody who walks into a room believing in some kind of forced learning is going to walk out of the room not believing in it because they've heard me preach this little mini-sermon about it. But I want you to be very clear about where I personally stand. And I should say, by the way, that I suspect that the number of homeschoolers or alternative school people who really agree with me is probably well under 50%. I mean, I think this is a minority even among homeschoolers. You don't have to believe what I just said to be a homeschooler or to run an alternative school. But I'm the one who's sitting up here and that's what I think. …

In 35 randomized control trials in 18 countries, he and other researchers found that when students are allowed some opportunity to take their own initiative, they are more engaged in class and better able to master new skills, they have better grades and fewer problems with peers — and they are happier, too. The effect sizes were often between 0.7 and 0.9, a significant degree of impact. Importantly, the teachers did not need to change the curriculum they taught or alter their disciplinary approach. They just applied a few new teaching practices in the course of their normal lesson. [My emphasis—PF]