Our new research on the nature and variety of the pleasure avid adolescent readers take from their out-of-school reading (Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want—and Why We Should Let Them) demonstrates that pleasure is not incidental to reading—it’s essential.  Indeed, we found that the young people with whom we worked spoke of their reading pleasure with remarkable sophistication—and their pleasure supported the intense and high-level engagement with texts that schools seek to foster. 

Absolutely!

More and more educators are being forced to recognize that learning is fundamental and most formal education is obtrusive and obstructive to the natural process of learning already embedded in children.

Sugata Mitra's SOLE is a great example of simply getting out of the way so kids can learn--almost always at greater speed and quality than what is current age specific doctrine:

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html