Is open learning experimental? Is there any research to prove its efficacy?

1. Most of what we learn – during non school/college years – that is from 0 to 3 years old and then from 25 years till death – is actually open self-directed learning. Three-fourths of our life cannot be an experiment.

Formal education system has been around for about two hundred years. Before that for thousands of years most children / adults did not go to any school. Surely all of those can’t be failures. What sounds like an experiment – the one that has been around for 200 hundred or all of human history before that?