I fear somebody is going to complain that disruptive behavior is what we need to teach children so they can innovate and question authority. Open to discussion, but if it worked that way, we'd be overwhelmed with innovators and independent thinkers today.

Uh... We are overwhelmed with innovators and thinkers. This is the most innovative age in technology, science and the arts in history!

I don't know if childhood "disruptive behavior" is correlated or anti-correlated or independent of innovation in adulthood. But your argument doesn't seem to work.

what evidence do you have that your schools are better than nothing at all?

"Nothing at all" doesn't happen any more in the Western countries. Education is legally mandatory and if you don't go to a normal school you have to have some alternate acceptable form of education (e.g. homeschooling). The zero-intervention control group that you desire does not exist in real life.

In the third world you can find large enough groups of kids who don't go to any schools, but good luck trying to disentangle the effect of that from the general economic/status/IQ factors. Kids who don't go to school generally don't go because they can't and that makes for huge selection bias.

Possibly relevant: Sudbury schools, with the curriculum of "do whatever you want, as long as you're in school, surrounded by interesting stuff". Also, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn. It really seems that we are doing quite bad by default...

As it turns out, for example, kids are quite good at learning stuff from each other (including things like reading... "I can't always get the big kids to read me stories, so I'd better go and learn this <> thing from them"...)

Now, find a way to prevent that from happening. Sorting kids by age and separating the groups? Perfect.

The main requirements at school are sitting still and being quiet. Perfect for a corpse, not so good for a child. In fact, rather like torture for a child with a natural impulse to move and explore. Pair the torture with enforced learning, and you can condition the desire to learn right out of him.

I've seen a couple of TED talks now where they make computers available to kids with no instruction at all, and they work and work at them until they figure them out, and keep learning the material supplied.

Give your kid a desk where he can stand or sit and work at a computer with Khan Academy, and he'll run circles around the kids crippled in the usual school environments.

I am so jealous of what's possible for kids today, and so happy for them. They're going to make it over the barbed wire and out of the prison camp. They're going to escape.

Everyone uses the existing curriculum as the control.

And there's nothing wrong with that - you need to compare two things, and it's very helpful to have a common point of comparison so everyone's control groups match up at least nominally. In this case, the common point is 'existing curriculum'.

I actually learned the names of all the states from a song and learned where they are from a jigsaw puzzle.

I had a state Jigsaw puzzle at one point and I distinctly remember the "Fifty Nifty United States Song." so I want to confirm that you are not the only one who has had these things happen.

It is important to ask if an instructional intervention better than none at all, or more generally to ask if our formal education is better than no education at all. People just assume that what schools do is beneficial. We need evidence to determine if that is true for any educational intervention or system.

One truth is that formal education is intended to teach specific things that "society" or our culture want children to learn. If we don't direct learning, likely many fewer children would learn the intended information or skills. I make no assertion about whether students should be learning these things; but it seems some things like reading and multiplication are obviously good for most children to learn. Fewer students would learn these things is no formal education were required.

The popular assertion that we should teach young students "how to think" or "form abstractions" (which may be the same thing) makes the common mistake of assuming that such things can be learned via instruction (or any planned activity). Again, we need empirical evidence that thinking can be taught . We also have Piaget and others suggesting that younger students do not have sufficient cognitive development to learn abstractions or other specific cognitive abilities. Lastly, we know that higher order learning in any domain requires a good deal of lower level knowledge (e.g., facts) be acquired before higher order learning can occur.

What do you mean by "un-googlable education program"?