Currently, for reasons that escape me, you lot (Americans) seem to have decided to import those banes of thinking and real learning - standardized tests.

Standardized tests aren't the bane of thinking and learning. Drilling children over and over with questions identical to those on some test is the bane of thinking and learning. The United States has had standardized tests at least since I was a child (I took standardized tests in elementary school almost thirty years ago) and U.S. education has continued to be progressive during that time. College admissions were very heavily influenced by standardized tests when I was in high school, but my classmates and I were not taught by rote, because our teachers did not believe rote learning was effective.

Let me give you a concrete example. My ex-girlfriend grew up in South Korea. She did very well in calculus in high school, where she learned to solve problems by rote. They were shown different kinds of problems to solve, they memorized the steps to solve them by rote, and then they practiced solving those problems. That's all they did: memorize the steps and then apply them over and over to thousands of problems. Then they were tested on exactly the same kind of problems. She got excellent grades and test scores, but she cannot tell you what a derivative or an integral are or why you would use them. I was taught entirely differently. I was taught the concept of the derivative and the integral. I was taught from pictures before I was taught with symbols. The motivation for the concepts was discussed. I don't remember if we discussed it in class, but the textbook even described some of the historical context. We often learned computations in the context of applications: a tank filling with water, a car accelerating, etc.[+]

Do you know what? Calculus was tested the same way in my school system here in the U.S. as in Korea. Each test had a bunch of problems. The more problems I solved, the higher my score. That's it! Nothing creative or touchy-feely or magical about it. Not really any different from the way my ex was tested in Korea. At the end of the course, there was a standard test administered uniformly across the nation (the Advanced Placement exam.)

American teachers routinely invoke the idea of "teaching to the test" to imply that there are bad teaching methods that lead to better test scores than good teaching methods. Basically, they threaten to teach more and more poorly the more their students are tested. The truth is that under pressure to produce good scores, teachers continue to use the techniques they believe are effective. Teachers in the U.S. are taught that rote learning is not effective, so they don't use it. Teachers who believe that rote learning is effective will use it regardless of whether their students are tested or not.

tl;dr My ex-girlfriend and I were TESTED the same way, but we were TAUGHT entirely differently, because our teachers were trained differently.

[+] Of course, it turns out that in order to learn how to do the problems, I had to actually do the problems, and to a limited extent, the more problems I did the easier they became. In the United States education system, we are taught to be horrified by this evil, poisonous art of getting better at something by practicing it, but we still do it. Teachers universally disapprove of it, but they have not figured out how to eradicate it from their classrooms. (Getting rid of testing would be a good first step, I suppose, since then we wouldn't have to worry about whether the students can actually demonstrate competence at anything; we could teach them to attain pure, perfect internal understanding untainted by any outward manifestation.)