Every student is forced to read the same materials and books. Tests are designed to test how close they remember the same correct answers. It’s always been rare that a novel interpretation or idea has come out of a classroom. The modern, structured education has never been designed to generate creative people.

I hear this sentiment repeated a lot, but I've never seen it to be true in practice. My kids' teachers absolutely do nurture creativity, and I don't think our school district is particularly unique.

True - but it did have the benefit of giving the majority of people who passed through it the same benefit of a baseline understanding of "things" - those with aptitude and talent (and time and privilege) could take that further and build upon those fundamentals.

Now however, if people are not even internalizing those fundamentals in order to even re-write things in their own words, using their own "mental model" (perhaps correct, sometimes not) - I fear they won't even develop "mental models" and abstractions...