Teachers don’t teach, they should be called guides and if they can’t see they can’t guide anything.

More people in America probably learned more physics and math through MythBusters than they did in school.

In America the social incentives to learn anything are broken, it is cool to be stupid and that is a problem since nobody really wants to learn because it means being uncool, so if you want to teach anything to people who aspire to be stupid you need to make the knowledge look stupid too, knowledge can be used to do dumb things and it looks cool, you may not like it but really, nobody will teach someone that doesn’t want to learn, people teach themselves what they perceive is important and relevant to their lifes just like other animals do, that is a simple fact that everybody should be able to grasp.

One real big problem is why people want to be stupid?
Mostly because most people are afraid of failure and acquiring knowledge to do it right will lead you to being mocked by others because of the “stupid” failures everybody will experience and if you don’t have a security net or a good enough mind you will crack, giving up that route and search for things that are more doable.

Teachers expectations influence that, you can see the disapproval on the eyes of educators everywhere when someone fails, you can see the stupid teachers doing the stupid thing and that is shaming the student out of anger or the misguided belief that shame will change his ways.

So most young people fall into the safe place and that is the stupid but cool camp where anything goes and everything you do is cool and nobody will give you the stinky eye and if they do they are perceived as being jealous.

The old way of teaching and is the only way for centuries now only works if people want to learn something and see a need for it, they need to derive some sort of benefit, and appearances is everything, in poor countries people strive to get educated and endure anything because to be educated there means to get social respect in their minds even if 99% of those educated never actually get anything that they initially thought, the good thing is that once they realize that, they are experienced enough(older enough) hopefully to see the other benefits of education and continue to pursue more knowledge because knowledge is capable of freeing people from being dependent on others completely.
You want to make booze you can, you want to get cement to build something you can, you want to make a car part by melting iron with a DIY induction furnace you can, because there is so much raw material(trash) around us you can do it for free too, that is why most DIY people are old people and not young.

To be young is to be insecure and ignorant after and ignorance is something that feeds insecurity but they don’t know that they don’t feel that, they feel afraid they are highly sensitive to social perceptions and any negative thing that happens while they are learning will push them to places that they feel safe and the safest place to be is on the stupid but cool camp not the snob educated camp, unless you make the stupid camp need sciences and math to make it look cool there comes in MythBusters style higher education, where failure is ok is part of trying to be cool.

Anything can work, the system of teaching today can work under certain social conditions that need to exist, but those don’t exist in America thus why education in America is appalling and why “teachers” are so incompetent, they are not able to adapt to changing social norms, they are not able to teach because people don’t want to be taught, because they don’t want to be mocked and ridiculed for not being able to achieve the expectations of others, that environment needs to change but since it is a cultural thing and everybody is guilty of it, this probably won’t happen anytime soon.

Quote:

There is no substitute for a good instructor.

Here is your first post and here is why it is wrong.
Good instructors are a minority, those are rare people that have uncharacteristic amount of empathy and patience, all the rest don’t care, you will never have good instructors in numbers enough inside a society that does not emphasize empathy toward others and enforce patience as a rule because those are the two most important characteristics of good instructors, that is not going to happen in America where fights break out because of silly things and everybody appears to have no patience, which is reflect in the judicial system by the huge amount of litigation going on.

But it turns out that instructors are not that important, access to the knowledge is, this is why other countries that have the same exact education system fare better because they have a set of social rules that stimulate the search for knowledge.

So either you change culture inside a country or you change the way “teaching” is done, the easier way is to change the teaching ways to ignore empathy and patience and concentrate on what the underlying social norms are.