Disturbing (tho not as disturbing as these NYC teacher's stories).

I'm not sure about your "age-demographic" point: what you have described is poor teaching, period, it has little or nothing to do with age, and little or nothing to do with being able to use new technologies. In fact, it kinda goes to show that using new information technologies (or at least computers) does not per se automatically generate good teaching and learning.

As for your disenchantment with schools, I think Gatto has pretty well summed it up in the Underground History of American Education: the problem is that of a mass, compulsory education system. It is incorrigible, born of the wedding of utopian dreams by such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, and the tools of scientific social management.