[TheAceOfHearts]

I'll play devil's advocate. There could be many explanations: maybe the teachers don't consider it torture and they're true believers. Personally, I remember growing up sometimes teachers would start complaining about having to cover certain topics in specific ways that were mandated by the department of education, and being forced to stick to a strict curriculum that was sent down by faceless figures. If teachers aren't empowered to push back and execute on their conception of the best possible lesson plan, and any complaint puts their future pension at risk, they might just gradually lose interest in being an exceptional teacher while continuing to show up for the paycheck. This is a common occurrence in other domains, so it wouldn't surprise me if it's true about some teachers. Reflecting back on some of my most exceptional teachers, they would often invest a lot of their own money, extra time, and resources in order to give students the best possible educational experience.

There is also a bit of diffusion of responsibility. Maybe no single act can be interpreted as particularly tortuous, so it's easily excused by the person doing it. But taken collectively, it adds up into a harmful outcome.

This might vary depending on where you were educated, but a lot of my education growing up was lacking in epistemic exploration. We were often just fed a ton of facts by authority figures and expected to memorize and recite them at will, without diving into how those things were known or exploring concepts of epistemic uncertainty and the framing of historical contexts. Oftentimes this would result in people memorizing a bunch of facts for a test, after which the information was discarded, because there was no effort put into integrating newly acquired knowledge. One example for me was imaginary numbers in an early pre-calculus course, where we learned that these things existed and the basic rules for how they functioned, but it wasn't until many years later that I finally got to see how this concept could be applied and used.