Giving more freedom to all people in a population creates more variance of growth. Give more agency to all people and some will excel exponentially, some will improve linearly, some will get stuck in a constant plateau, and some will go down asymptotically toward zero.

Replace agency with structure and all will progress uniformly. The ones who’ll improve exponentially and linearly will get slowed down. The rest of the population will only experience slight improvement in growth. This results in less aggregate growth in the long run.

Teachers who let the students study independently without pestering the students with homework are giving more freedom. Teachers who spoon-feed the students with information, homework, and exercise hinder aggregate growth. In this context, moderation may be optimal: educational institutions need enough structure (in the form of curriculum, homework, exams, etc.) to quantify the capability of students. This, unfortunately, implies that education will always be suboptimal.

For individual students, the solution is obvious and not that hard to implement: don’t let your education interferes with your learning; get more freedom and use it responsibly. Implement this solution and you’ll excel exponentially.

For educational institutions, I don’t even know if there exists a solution. The ideal situations would be to customize the curriculum to each student, and, for the teacher, to teach and treat every student differently. This solution obviously doesn’t play well with real world limitations such as time and salary.