It's a two way street in the end; you can't hold kids down and make them acquire knowlege. Maybe my experiences were aberrant (as some suggest ) and it's just coincidence that popular culture has for years portrayed most school kids as enduring their studies an unwelcome obligation and interruption to things in which they actually have an interest, but there's little evidence of that (unless you accept the mantra that all our schools failings are the fault of worthless teachers). Good teachers seek and often find ways to engage their students, employ various techniques to reach as many as possible rather than a few stock methods known to have the greatest impact, but there are limits, particularly when previous lackluster educators have dulled a students general interest in education. Once again, I don't recall any of my classmates complaining about dialogues that could easily have been class dicussions (and, in other classes where most students did care, frequently were), and they certainly didn't complain about lack of teacher engagement or course accessibility. In the class I had in mind most of them WANTED to sit there like lumps and learn the minimal amount of material necessary to pass the class, and the teacher playing class jester daily wouldn't have changed that.