Our schools actively discourage independent though and action. I, not to toot my own horn, am fairly bright. Rather than encourage me to put it to good use, I got in trouble for things like reading ahead, doing math in my head instead of on paper, filling out the workbook ahead, etc. They were more worried about me following orders. But they always made up some BS excuse like "you will make the others feel dumb" (obviously not word for word lol). I did have one really good teacher for PC class and economics. Let me do the whole workbook and then I spent the rest of those classes playing Quake 3 Arena.