Great question. And a hard one. But knowing a proposed solution will worsen the situation is an important step in it.
It’s like every time a person says “see, this is what happens when you don’t hit children” at every behavior issue. Even though we know that hitting children objectively worsens behavior over doing nothing, but they insist that doing the only thing they know, even if harmful, is better.
Let me give you an example, everyone has heard “when will we use this in real life?” in math class. The same people asking those questions are the same that groan at word problems
I had a math teacher that helped us see which math we would use in real life, and which math we wouldn’t, and helped us understand why the latter was still important for us to know. Everyone paid attention to her.
What’s the real complaint the student has? They have to try.
When you have a room of 30 students and 29 of them are complaining about something, we need to remind people that one of the real life uses of math (stats & probability to be precise) is to point out how unlikely it is that those 29 students are the causal variable.
I agree that so much more can be done to make school fun, but it’s not all on the teachers. Students have to be present, participate and willing to leave their comfort zone in order to have better results.
“Personal Responsibility” attitudes just doesn’t work for crowd dynamics, especially with regards to children. The way a group behaves is nearly 100% predictable from the balance of outside human factors. In this case, the outside factors are parents and teachers. That’s it. Either there is something that all the parents are doing wrong, or the teachers.
Since there are some teachers who have far more success than others (common “favorite subjects” based on school), that means the most likely cause, and mechanism for improvements, are the teachers.