School expects children to behave uniformly and they are disciplined accordingly, but learning is much more an individual than a social experience. Some schools have more respect for the individual. High student to teacher ratios make that schoolteachers resort to methods aimed more at keeping children quiet, than at learning. Typical exercises are colouring in, reading from the blackboard, dictation and mental arithmetic. Typical tests are filling in names of capital cities and countries on a blank world map and quoting years in which historical battles took place.
Children have to learn all kinds of silly facts by heart.
Learning all such facts by heart is of little use to children in their later life. It is simply a gigantic waste of their talents. There are schools with a somewhat different approach, such as international schools where children are taught in different languages. There are also schools that have lower student to teacher ratios, mostly schools for children with special needs, such as autism, dyslexia, physical disabilities and behavioural problems. But, generally, all these schools stick to the same curriculum as other schools, they all put subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic on a pedestal.