School factory is a complicated concept, the sustainable world despises it, capitalism consuming society is dependant on it. A great example can be a large operating mine. The operating company have designed a routine and wants employees to learn the routine, perform it in a safe, productive manner like a robot. They train employees over and over (like quarterly mandatory training) for the same routines to make sure they go through it step by step; because an incident will cause more loss than a profit based on a new way of completing a task. Shortcuts are forbidden, and instructions are the golden rules, especially if you are a worker in the field. It can make sense in terms of ensuring that employees are careful enough in completing the job in the safest way without skipping a step to finishing the job earlier. This emphasis on codes and rulebooks can increase safety, preventing the potential hazards of working with heavy-high energy machinery. However, the employees are turning to robots! They are expected to work like robots! But why they do not replace them with robots which can be easily done for simple tasks such as remotely controlled equipment, automatic data logger and so many other simple examples. One reason is that they can create jobs for the local community and get social acceptance. And those employees are happy earning money by following a simple routine in some cases. The interesting part is when they have the same instructions for engineering tasks as well, and if an engineer as the design wants to change a routine in one task there is a long justification process which makes it almost impossible to have a creative idea. If they need a creative idea they hire consulting companies. All of this is to secure the process as much as possible to have a minimum loss in case of any failure or challenging crisis. In this system, the risk of trying a new beneficial path is more than repeating the traditional time-consuming ways. And they apply technology just in case of urgent need and guaranteed result.

You might think that; it is the rule of the business so what? My point is that to train engineers for such a system, there is no need to change the school factory method. The traditional schooling is exactly what industrialized and developing societies require. They hire you to serve a certain task you want to make a home run out of it which is not required, they switch you with an easier-to-deal-with employee. Large companies and organizations and also governments are supporting this education system as it is in their favor. Therefore, although there are research-based organizations which support novelty for their purposes and are supporting higher education, the majority of the jobs in the society required trained obeying employees graduated from a school factory as explained by Seth Godin.

My point is that an aware knowledgeable teacher, who values the novelty and ingenuity, is one side of the story. The other side is the system, which measures students based on their performance on tests. Teachers cannot ignore the acceptance rate of their students on those national or required tests and just rely on training future entrepreneurs. The assessment system is the one which the large companies require to pick the employees who will obey instead of making a mess by initiating a new method.

My question is that, how much is the role of the teacher in this system? I remember my college years in Iran. The entire curriculum was designed to teach students technics in theory with no room to think out of the box. Even in such a framed education system, the courses which were taught by more knowledgeable instructors who encourage students to get deep in concepts were more interesting to me, I spend more time on having extracurricular study on their topics and I am better at them even now. So, the bright side is that although the system might be rigid, the teachers have the power to create microcracks in it.