[loandbehold]

You are conflating two unrelated issues: 1. Letting students learn their own way as opposed to memorizing teachers' instructions 2. Letting disruptive kids disrupt education of their classmates

#1 is good, #2 is bad. In fact #1 never works when #2 is present.

[marcus_holmes]

I'm not an education expert. But I think you have to ask why the disruptive kids are being disruptive. It might be that #2 is caused by not having #1 (at least, that was my experience: I stopped being disruptive when they let me do my own thing).