Here are some sites that say a lot about the way we are instructed. Read over them and decide what can be done and believed.

Mr. Gatto's writings- http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Gatto.html

If you dont read the whole thing, read the 7 lesson school teacher.
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

Then there's John Holt who wrote in the 60's and 70's. Growing without schooling- http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC06/Holt.htm

Matt Hearn's book- 'Field Day: Getting Society Out of School'

Paulo Friere is essential writing. An interview and critique follows-
http://aurora.icaap.org/talks/freire.html
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm

Teaching as a subversive activity- Neil Postman,Charles Weingartner- a book from the 1970's. - http://subversiveteaching.tripod.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry_Method

Perhaps if we got beyond our fear of actually teaching people to think, we would develop a more educated group who could work out the problems of the world better than limiting understanding and pushing morals and values. It would motivate more people to come up with answers to our problems and real solutions to our greed based individualised nuclear family viewpoint.

In a morally oppressive and corrupt society like ours, true evil lies more in ignorance than in knowledge and understanding.

I know we have some teachers on this site and am not intending to denigrate teachers by posting this, only to point out how much better our schools (and by extention, our society) could be with some changes to the system.