My schools always did a good job of demanding critical thinking and punishing me for not showing my work. I came out with a working understanding of theory of mind, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the scientific method, and damn if they didn't try to get me to understand how to turn a word problem into diagram that I could make deductions from.

The idea that you'd teach children a bunch of facts and they'd just accept it like programing is insulting to their capacity in my eyes.