There were 2 documentaries produced by famed documentarian Frederick Wiseman called High School and High School 2. In one, a group of average students are foll

There were 2 documentaries produced by famed documentarian Frederick Wiseman called High School and High School 2. In one, a group of average students are followed through a typical high school in a middle class predominantly white area. In the second one, a group of students are followed through an experimental high school in a predominantly impoverished area with mostly a Latino population. The 'experimental' nature of the school was that every single class, every last one, was completely restructured to center around one thing: critical thinking. Teaching by fiat ('this is how it is because I say so and I am the authority') was banned. Every bit of teaching was through asking questions and having them answered, students challenging teachers on an equal intellectual playing field (unequal in specific knowledge of course, but equal in capacity to reason and challenge assumptions). The experimental school produced the highest proportion of students to go on to receive college degrees (not just attend college, but finish) every seen in the country. The results were absolutely amazing and tremendously good. But... it's harder for teachers to teach that way. They can't plan ahead. They have to know their subjects inside and out, not just read off of a lesson plan. If a student asks a question that the teacher can't answer, the teacher has to admit it and try to figure it out with them, which many teachers are not emotionally mature enough to participate in alongside an adolescent. It gives a great deal of power and agency to adolescents, and our society is obsessed with stripping adolescents of every iota of control over their own life and denigrating them as much as possible. So widespread adoption of such schooling cannot gain much support at all. The documentaries also did a good job showing how the "traditional" schooling methods broke the 'spirit' of adolescents and sucked the love of learning and figuring things out right out of them, turning them into disinterested husks of human beings, while the experimental school left them as vibrantly full of a love of life and learning as they entered it. Such things are of course difficult to measure and generally distrusted by our "pleasure is a sure sign of hidden dangers" mentality.