School Has It Backwards

Kids (and adults) are only lazy in the context of being made to do things they don't want to do. Kids who aren't subjected to school have lots of energy because they're exploring things they're excited about. Learning is playing for them.

I think we need first to understand what the purpose of schooling is. When you say "terrible at delaying gratification" and "learn or die", is it something that helps one to be an achiever, or something that helps one to live a happier life?

I think the schools have been long useful for 3 main purposes:

• Being a (mostly unsafe) training ground for socialisation.
• Producing "standardised" packages of knowledge, which is useful for economy, since everyone knows what to expect.
• Encouraging people with a tendency to overachieve to excel at it.

Of these three, only the first one is strictly for the benefit of the student, and even at that it is implemented quite poorly. The thing is, the schools were never designed to maximally help somebody in living a happy life. Of course, we've never had the luxury to do that, but as we are progressing further and further from the matters of pure survival, it's something to consider. And that's what the linked article is really about.

PS I must also mention that the schools are not at the root of this problem. The culture that judges people by their achievement and success is deeply ingrained in the US (compared to, say, Europe), and the schools and parents simply train the kids to survive in it. See also a great (and lengthy) inspection of this phenomenon by The Last Psychiatrist: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stanford-marshmallow-prison-experiment .

Yes, Montessori education is one possible implementation of this idea.

The more general term for "education that tries to make kids understand" is constructivism. Maria Montessori was among the first. Famous psychologists that contributed to constructivism are Piaget and Vygotsky. The latest development in my part of the world is Hejný method for teaching mathematics. In computer science, Seymour Papert designed the Logo programming language.

Different methodologies have different focus. Although Maria Montessori had some opinions on teaching students up to 24 years, the majority of her work focuses on pre-school education. This is why there is so much emphasis on toys that teach the basic concepts. Vít Hejný was a high-school teacher of mathematics, so his method focuses on teaching math within the framework of standard elementary and high school. Different authors prefer different learning tools, for example Montessori method illustrates the concept of number using beads, while Hejný method uses a "stepping belt". There are many other different details.

There is also criticism of constructivism, which sometimes focuses on individual implementations (and some of them were really crazy, usually by taking the concept of independent discovery too far), and sometimes addresses the central claims. Here is my attempt to steelman the central criticism:

• constructivists claim that understanding improves learning, but there is little empirical evidence for this (at least in modern era, because Maria Montessori definitely did miracles in her era), kids taught using constructivist methods often do not outperform kids taught using the standard memorization;
• "copy blindly first, develop understanding later" is how homo sapiens learns things naturally (e.g. you talk to your babies, you don't explain them grammar), and it works, which puts a huge burden of proof on people saying they can outperform the method we are literally evolved to use;
• exploration takes more time, so even assuming it would ultimately lead to better understanding, it is not obvious that the cost:benefit ratio would be better (some of the crazy methods resulted in 12 years old kids who knew dozen different methods for addition, but didn't know multiplication yet).

There are also, sadly, more pragmatic arguments against constructivism, such as difficulty of finding enough math teachers who really understand math, or resistance of parents who themselves learned math by memorizing and now can't help their kids with their homework.

Not OP, but I've done a bit of digging on this. Education research is really in a bit of a bind when it comes to looking at very-different models. The conventional model is so well established and broadly applied that it's really hard to get powerful studies of anything radically different from what you see in public schools today. Nearly all of the energy in Ed departments at various universities is focused there because that's where 95%+ of kids spend their time.

There are a handful of homeschooling studies that differentiate between "unschoolers" and more-conventional homeschooling approaches, but it's so niche that removing confounders is basically impossible.

You also run into the issue that making meaningful metrics for comparison is really challenging. Unschoolers are probably less likely to do well on a pre-calc test, but simultaneously more likely to earn an advanced math degree - the kids who have a proclivity for math get to dedicate a lot more time to it, while the others happily get by with perhaps only arithmetic and algebra.

I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that dramatically more freedom for school-aged kids is a great thing, but my conviction rests mostly on anecdote and personal experience spending lots of time in spaces that are run in a more self-directed way -- the research-backing just isn't there.