[tprice7]

The other typical retort is this: in the real world, you often have to do boring and unpleasant tasks, and unschooled children are therefore unprepared for the real world, since they spent all their time doing whatever they want.

The people who make this argument overlook the fact that coercion is not required for someone to be motivated to do unpleasant tasks. If you have a goal, you will be motivated to do the tasks that help you reach that goal. It's pretty much never the case that those tasks are uniformly pleasant for any nontrivial goal. And I don't believe that coercion is required for children to form constructive goals. I know I certainly had goals as a teenager that motivated me to do much more difficult and substantial things than anything I encountered in school, and in this case the coercion was in the opposite direction.