Going to school is probably the most miserable experience of my life. It's up there with having a job that started at 7:30 AM.
And what does your personal experience of that model have to do with it? A lot of people have adjusted schooling hours to better reflect children's biological rhythms. The specific failures of your personal education need not be systemic issues.
Finally, the fundamental issue with education is that it is meant as the great equalizer in society meant to put everyone on a decent pedestal to start things off. It is fundamentally unfair that some children be better educated than others for any reason whatsoever. Scandinavian countries have been aware of this and, while it's never a solved issue, have been doing substantially better than their peers in most areas.
Besides, it doesn't matter what your schooling is as much. Someone who has rich parents and a high school diploma has a higher income than someone with poor parents and a college degree.
Also, you can educate yourself for free on the Internet. I learned more this way than I did in college.
Oh, they exist. They're smack in the middle of the IQ standard distribution curve, that part of the curve for which the educational system was designed. They don't have to be dissuaded from original thoughts, or curiosity, or a tendency to question what they're taught, because these are inbred instincts.
It's hard for kids to love school; schools are prison. The only cases of people liking school I know were: a/ the bullies, b/ people in schools that are not run like prisons (my high school was that), c/ kids who developed Stockholm syndrome towards the school.
I suspect that c/ is actually an important goal of schooling - because such people make great employees later.
In the real world most education is government subsidized, and the counterexamples that do well seem to run on a non-profit model.
The best models of teaching will not get best customers. The best models of getting kids into college will win. That's what parents pay for. Which is a very different goal than any actual education.
When you have schooling as a government service, when the school doesn't have to care about stupid things like getting money, then they have time to focus on some weird and short-term-unprofitable things like actual education.