teaching parrots

I've been wondering for a while what excactly is wrong with the secondary schools here, and this comment:
This education system fails children by teaching them to parrot, not think

explains it quite nicely. Not that I care all that much about the Oxbridge statistics, but we are having huge trouble fighting the "we are not supposed to think, we just need to give the answers in the mark scheme" kind of philosophy, which seems to be endemic in the system.