My experience is somewhat similar to yours, I just loved "discovering" concepts, but I think that while this might work for us, it doesn't work for all. And this might be exactly what makes this problem hard, each person responds to different stimuli and then you either have to find a way to identify this, OR just pick something you want to optimize for (the average kid, prodigies, whatever) and apply the method that works for them, to all. I think this second method is what happens in most educational systems.