A Nature editorial on science education

This editorial in Nature Learning in the wild is drawing some flak in the comments section.
"Much of what people know about science is learned informally. Education policy-makers should take note.

The seemingly endless debate about how to improve US science education seems to make the tacit assumption that learning happens only in the classroom. As a result, the arguments tend to focus on issues such as curricula — specifying, say, what information pre-college students should be expected to learn at each grade level — and, as in US President Barack Obama's recent proposals to reform the No Child Left Behind policy, on the best way to hold schools to rigorous standards of student achievement.

However, researchers who study learning are increasingly questioning this assumption. Their evidence strongly suggests that most of what the general public knows about science is picked up outside school, through things such as television programmes, websites, magazine articles, visits to zoos and museums — and even through hobbies such as gardening and birdwatching. This process of 'informal science education' is patchy, ad hoc and at the mercy of individual whim, all of which makes it much more difficult to measure than formal instruction. But it is also pervasive, cumulative and often much more effective at getting people excited about science — and an individual's realization that he or she can work things out unaided promotes a profoundly motivating sense of empowerment.

The personal nature of informal science education is what makes it powerful. The question 'why is this relevant?' never even arises.
This suggests that policy-makers who focus exclusively on the classroom are missing an opportunity: even modest investment in informal science education could help to make the very large investment in formal instruction considerably more effective. Most of the necessary infrastructure is already in place: museums and zoos, for example, have been around for generations. Likewise, government funding mechanisms — agencies such as NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) — have been funding science exhibits, television specials and other informal science-education projects for many years."
One of the comments:
"Informal education is no panacea for science illiteracy. Every mind is hard won."
I think that there is much in what the editorial says and has been part of the education to some extent. Perhaps, nowadays, there is emphasis on teaching too much too early to cope with competetion. More experiments with the curriculum and the approximate right ages to teach different things as in Benezet's experiments mentoned in the previous post may be one way to go.
Related: Frank Oppenheimer's work with San Francisco Exploratorium and Benezet's experiments.
P.S. See also Why do Finland's schools get the best results? :
"According to the OECD, Finnish children spend the fewest number of hours in the classroom in the developed world."
P.P.S. Book Review: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Lou Aronica and Ken Robinson.