> your gripe with education seemed mostly focused on the failure to help smart kids

Not at all, I definitely did not express myself correctly. I really have no worries that the smart kids will mostly thrive, no matter what educational methods they are subjected to. Sure, some systems will work against them, but that is unavoidable.

My gripe is, first of all, with the fact that it is impossible to criticize education and, as a consequence, it is impossible to improve it. Nobody really knows whether one or another type/method works better than any other, and yet many people pretend to know, and pretend to have scientific knowledge about it. But because teaching is such an emotional subject, any teaching seems to be good teaching, and as such, we'll never really know which one works or not.

Given that, I don't really feel the obligation to use one method or the other, and I also don't feel like the success or failure of a student is my success or my fault. Don't get me wrong, I do my absolute best to do a good job. I believe in teaching by example, I believe in connecting theory to practice, I believe in reaching out to eventual special needs of specific students, etc. However, I also believe (and make it very clear to my students) that their success is still 95% based on their own hard work and motivation, and only 5% based on whatever it is that I offer them. I simply don't know whether my teaching is good or not; I'll never know.

As such, it is irresponsible of me to try to convince them (like some kind of religious leader or a witch doctor) that by following my "methods" they will thrive, and if they haven't, it's because they didn't follow me close enough. Sure, some will pass the exams with straight A's. Some students are very good in overfitting to the institutional assessments, and will build a kind of fake safety and comfort with their results. Does that mean they will do well out there? I have no idea. Others will fail my exams miserably. Some students are bored by structured, predictable goals and need more complex challenges; others are in the wrong area; others simply don't want to study. Does that mean they won't do well out there? I have no idea.

As such, I think that the only honest thing to do is this: offer them everything you can, but make it clear to them that they'll only learn as much they work to learn. The school will give them more space and time to make errors and learn from them, in a less traumatic way than the real world. But if they don't use that, i.e. if they don't actually work hard to learn and experiment and fail and try again, there is nothing I can do to make that better. Sorry. I'm only human, and I don't pretend to have a solution to this problem just to try to justify my existence as a teacher.

As for your question: I believe there is definitely an effect, but it could be good or bad. Some teaching will give motivation for students to develop their abilities; others will kill their creativity. My point is exactly that: we don't know, and never will. We're just witch doctors trying every possible plant to treat a disease. Randomly, some will actually work, some will not, and some will make it worse. But since we cannot check it objectively, we'll never know which is which.