Minimally Invasive Education in school adduces there are many reasons why children may have difficulty learning, specially when the learning is imposed and the subject is something the child, or the young, or even the adult is not interested in, as is frequently done in today's school system. Schools also label children as "learning disabled" and place them in special education even if the child does not have a learning disability, because the schools have failed to teach the children basic skills.
Minimally Invasive Education in school asserts there are many ways to study and learn. It argues that learning is a process you do, not a process that is done to you. The experience of schools holding this approach shows that there are many ways to learn without the intervention of teaching, to say, without the intervention of a teacher being imperative. In the case of reading for instance in these schools some children learn from being read to, memorizing the stories and then ultimately reading them. Others learn from cereal boxes, others from games instructions, others from street signs. Some teach themselves letter sounds, others syllables, others whole words. They adduce that in their schools no one child has ever been forced, pushed, urged, cajoled, or bribed into learning how to read or write, and they have had no dyslexia. None of their graduates are real or functional illiterates, and no one who meets their older students could ever guess the age at which they first learned to read or write. In a similar form students learn all the subjects, techniques and skills in these schools. Every person, children and youth included, has a different learning style and pace and each person, is unique, not only capable of learning but also capable of succeeding. These schools assert that applying the medical model of problem-solving to individual children who are pupils in the school system, and labeling these children as disabled—referring to a whole generation of non-standard children that have been labeled as dysfunctional, even though they suffer from nothing more than the disease of responding differently in the classroom than the average manageable student—systematically prevents the students' success and the improvement of the current educational system, thus requiring the prevention of academic failure through intervention. This, they clarify, does not refer to people who have a specific disability that affects their drives; nor is anything they say and write about education meant to apply to people who have specific mental impairments, which may need to be dealt with in special, clinical ways.
Describing current instructional methods as homogenization and lockstep standardization, alternative approaches are proposed, such as the Sudbury model schools, an alternative approach in which children, by enjoying personal freedom thus encouraged to exercise personal responsibility for their actions, learn at their own pace rather than following a chronologically-based curriculum. These schools are organized to allow freedom from adult interference in the daily lives of students. As long as children do no harm to others, they can do whatever they want with their time in school. The adults in other schools plan a curriculum of study, teach the students the material and then test and grade their learning. The adults at Sudbury schools are "the guardians of the children's freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn what they wish," creating and maintaining a nurturing environment, in which children feel that they are cared for, and that does not rob children of their time to explore and discover their inner selves. They also are there to answer questions and to impart specific skills or knowledge when asked to by students. As Sudbury schools, proponents of unschooling have also claimed that children raised in this method do not suffer from learning disabilities, thus not requiring the prevention of academic failure through intervention.