Are we just conservative?
Great job! i like your Scoop page on indigenous learning. I bookmarked Scoop for future use 
Ok, so it’s a win. Because, if I read your report correctly, of two things:
I wasn’t held back by a group but helped to progress by a ‘more able other’. I didn’t have to waste time at all. It was totally efficient.
and
Either I want to be immersed in the web and seeking help from others out there online, or immersed in a culture and a place. The classroom doesn’t really provide either of these immersive possibilities.
“Being held back by a group” is a very well known problem with classroom education. Teachers have to strike the right balance, catering to the middle part of the slow learner-fast learner frequency distribution and leaving the very slow and very fast to sort themselves out. (I absolutely hated school as a little boy (age 6-10) because I was fast and found it boring. I complained so much that my parents had me skip one year at age 10, and then it got better - but not for long. I could only really breathe when I finally got to university.) No surprise there.
The surprise is that people rave about social contact in the classroom environment, whereas you (and I - I have played this mission too) don’t think much of it. To me, it feels very much like people that used to say things like “Online papers are never going to take off! You can’t have your morning coffee while staring at a computer screen!” or “E-books are just not the same as smelling the paper of a newly bough book.” We all know how those went. And yet, the people making these point believed, in perfectly good faith, that they were being sensible, reasonable, wise. But they were not: they were suffering from a completely irrational conservative bias, a preference for the status quo.
I suspect this might be a common problem facing reformers. If, suppose, European policy makers were to attempt a reform on education, I suspect that they would know that the classroom model arose as a function of technological constraints that are no longer there. “Know” as in “we have done the science, and it is proven”. And yet, it must be exhausting to engage Joe Sixpack, day in day out, that thinks any deviation from the system he has grown up in (and probably hated at the time) is dangerous, radical and starry-eyed. Why are we biased in favour of the status quo?