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.