I agree with everything you said, and had the same problems with writing when I was younger. However, I would say that it's not so much that students don't have

I agree with everything you said, and had the same problems with writing when I was younger. However, I would say that it's not so much that students don't have anything to say, it's that they're not allowed to write about the things they actually care about in a way that is natural to them. Someone who's had three years of practice writing free-form persuasive essays about the non-school approved topic that they spend all their time thinking about (the NFL, girls, video games, etc.) is going to have a much easier time picking up the structured five-paragraph essay format than someone who was forced to write a bunch of five-paragraph essays about books they hated. All of the greatest essays I read now are random in length, style, topic, and presentation--why did I have to write somewhere between 50-100 structured essays about books and historical events I didn't care a whit about when Aldo Leopold was out there just dashing off whatever he was thinking about? The progression went like this: 1. I hated writing about historical events and books. 2. I graduated college. 3. I started reading unstructured essays about topics I cared about. 4. I started writing unstructured essays about topics I cared about. 5. I started writing about historical events and books.