How can you control a class of twenty students without some sort of authority and without requiring some sort of submission?
I realised what she said perhaps at a younger time than her age, maybe when I was 14, but as I have grown I have come to realise that I do owe much to that very system towards which I shared her feelings. Indeed perhaps it was because of that institution that I was able to even think such thoughts, and have such realisation and gain such understanding about such a great picture as an entire institution.
We should indeed find ways to improve our schools and perhaps even find such ways in this big picture scale. But you can not simply condemn this institution through some rhetoric. She says nothing specific and hardly offers any suggestions seeing as she is fresh from this institution and would perhaps know better than more how things can be improved.
And I submit, that she is unaware that she owes so much to that institution and that institution has offer her so much. She might not like it, but I doubt she could suggest that she is not the better for it.
Also, I do not think students are robots. They have plenty of freedom. Two weeks holidays every six weeks of teaching, six weeks summer holidays, then they have literature where they can be as creative as they like, and arts, and music, and sport, and plenty of afternoon free time. They hardly can be uncritical, but they do as they must learn that criticism, however truthful, has a price, especially if aimed at the powerful, i.e, teachers.
Unfortunately, there is no other way but to teach kids maths, how to read, biology, history, the facts and make them memorise them. If they don't remember the specifics, then their memory would improve, which I think correlates highly with intelligence, especially working memory, and they will learn plenty of other things, such as to see the bigger picture as she has. I doubt that without those literature classes she would have been able to, or without those history classes, or...