Speaking as a former TA who ran college classrooms for a while...
Classroom management rides the line between order and chaos. You don't want students constantly interrupting, but you don't want them to be silent. Assignment grading is rife with judgement calls - what qualifies as 'correct' work? Some students feel incredibly entitled and challenge any slighting (ie., getting downgraded for being wrong). In these conditions, it's easy to see how rolling out a pigeon hole system becomes the solution to the challenge.
So Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students is a bit of an unsubtle title, full of false dichotomies and ignorant of nuance.
I attended German, Hungarian and US schools in K-12. In my experience, the US system is the weakest form of education and all the touchy-feely liberalism just results in a crappy education. I knew guys who were taking some idiot version of algebra in 11th grade, homework was doing multiplication on a calculator?
No, I do want my students to talk. Please do not tell me what I think. I want my students to move from being bumps on a log to engaging in the subject, ie, becoming fluent in it.
Also, I hold the expectation that mere facts are dealt with out of the classroom - class is about moving into interpretation and analysis, which does not always have obvious solutions.
I guess I tend to have the opposite view, that the European systems tend to focus on drilling facts and highly regimented exam- and track-based advancement structures, while the U.S. system produces more creative students and more flexibility (and more entrepreneurs and inventions). But then neither of us are citing data. =]
edit: Though I suppose "European" probably needs to be further qualified, because my understanding is that the Scandinavian systems are in many ways even more liberal than the American one, with a strong emphasis on students' autonomy to co-direct their own education.
However, it's still not that difficult to grade for "well-done" work in subjective areas.
Whether the thesis of a literary analysis paper is "correct" may be opinion, for example, but it's definitely possible to grade fairly based on a rubric of "did the student defend their thesis in a clear, organized manner, properly using appropriate citations from the text" (after filtering out theses that are completely inane or insane).
I was a TA for several years as a grad student, and was the sole instructor for an introductory programming class. I constantly asked my class questions - I did not want them to be silent. If your just march on through material without getting feedback from the class, you have no idea if anything is sticking.
TTT, Teacher Talking Time, something that should be minimized in most classrooms. I taught English to non-native speakers for a year, and did my best to minimize talking time, and to increase creative opportunities through games, strategies, team work, and entertainment. Of course in a conversational English class, minimizing TTT is extremely important. But I would say even in most other classes, teachers just talk too much, and don't focus nearly enough on properly engaging the students.
Classroom management rides the line between order and chaos. You don't want students constantly interrupting, but you don't want them to be silent. Assignment grading is rife with judgement calls - what qualifies as 'correct' work? Some students feel incredibly entitled and challenge any slighting (ie., getting downgraded for being wrong). In these conditions, it's easy to see how rolling out a pigeon hole system becomes the solution to the challenge.
So Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students is a bit of an unsubtle title, full of false dichotomies and ignorant of nuance.