From this student's point of view, pretty much all high school classes (and grade school classes, for that matter) involved some degree of "rigid stultification

From this student's point of view, pretty much all high school classes (and grade school classes, for that matter) involved some degree of "rigid stultification -- a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry." When you take a high school class - any high school class - you are required to learn what the teacher wants you to learn the way s/he wants you to learn it. You're giving up "creativity and free inquiry" in both cases. Letting some random teacher rather than the AP board set the curriculum might be a good idea if you've got an unusually good teacher, but it would be a bad idea if you don't. (In fact, if you've got a teacher that good, maybe you should make his curriculum what the AP board test on so more students can benefit from it!) Caveat: I only took STEM-type AP classes - math/physics/biology/compsci. No humanities.