Self-Regulated Learning — Applied Metacognition
This is a well-established area of study that is a cognitive/metacognitive approach to self-education, similar to what I'm describing above. It's just using a different term. Similar to other experts on metacognition, people in this area have developed a variety of high-quality programs — like those mentioned at the end of Livingston's page in "Metacognition and Cognitive Strategy Instruction" — for skills that are general and also specialized (for reading, writing, arithmetic,...) and for the whole range of ages. These programs are built on a strong foundation of knowledge about self-regulated learning; I think their work will be very useful for education, and soon this section will contain more information about self-regulated learning, or (more likely) their "applied metacognition" will be merged into the main section about "metacognition" above, since it already contains many applications.