I am not the person you replied to, but you are wrong about this;
> "I am the teacher, and you will not do anything I don't sanction, like learning way more than I demand for today's lesson"
The person explicitly made it clear that while you can be encouraged on your own initiatives you still need to be graded/ranked on a common scale with your peers and hence the need for some sort of standardization.
For example, in a recent HN discussion on "Software Developer Productivity" lots of folks were arguing on how you can have no common scale/metrics and so you can make no comparisons at all between developers which is plainly wrong.
Education is about giving everybody a minimum standard of knowledge/tools needed for the Modern World and that is what a Teacher/Professor focuses on. Every Society needs to revere/honour (and pay well !) their Teachers/Professors because they are the ones who build the next generation.
This was college. Not primary school.
The point (which they are amply paid to perform) is to make sure you learn the necessities of the science/art/craft. They can do this any way they like I suppose.
But to resort to primary-school gold stars and points and such is possibly the very worst way, the lowest common denominator of the educator's craft.
I dare say my enthusiasm was evident. Knowledge and skill were on ample display. A better educator would have responded to that, advised more advanced study, given a different book and a different challenge.
I know; I was still naive, anticipating my college experience would be somehow different from the mass-indoctrination that had been primary and secondary school. It was my first inkling that no, that was not to be.
I think you have too many preconceptions, assumptions and misinterpretations here. My charitable interpretation of your comment would be that you have been scarred strongly by the event you describe and are generalizing from it unnecessarily. The uncharitable interpretation would be that you have an inflated sense of your own self-worth which was not validated in the above event.
When it comes to our own selves we are all necessarily biased in our own favour. Hence we need to step back and take a broader perspective so that we can be objective in our assessments. In today's society Teaching as a profession (in School/College/University) has been unfairly denigrated and become a thankless job. They are asked to operate only within a defined policy framework and not really allowed freedom to change that framework. In spite of that there are scores of stories (and even movies made) where Teachers have gone well beyond their boundaries to help students learn and perform. If you want to blame somebody blame the "System" built by policy-making idiots with no idea of human psychology, behaviour, needs etc. Teachers are really caught between a rock and a hard place i.e. policy says follow standardized curriculum/tests and don't do any creative individual things whereas students want individual recognition/attention and don't want to be called out on their lack of hardwork and application to proper studies. Hence we need to be understanding of them.
> "I am the teacher, and you will not do anything I don't sanction, like learning way more than I demand for today's lesson"
The person explicitly made it clear that while you can be encouraged on your own initiatives you still need to be graded/ranked on a common scale with your peers and hence the need for some sort of standardization.
For example, in a recent HN discussion on "Software Developer Productivity" lots of folks were arguing on how you can have no common scale/metrics and so you can make no comparisons at all between developers which is plainly wrong.
Education is about giving everybody a minimum standard of knowledge/tools needed for the Modern World and that is what a Teacher/Professor focuses on. Every Society needs to revere/honour (and pay well !) their Teachers/Professors because they are the ones who build the next generation.