The bigger problem that I see is the overall industrial model of education, which says that a better education is one in which more facts are pushed into students in less time (regardless of who it is doing the fact-pushing). This is what creates the conflict between a Socratic method, which forces students to come up with their own answers, and the ever-growing database of knowledge. It's the same problem in other disciplines, but exaggerated in science because we put a lot more money into scientific research. Depth of questioning and critical thinking require are skills that require time and practice.

That's the main benefit of indoctrination from a process point of view; it's fast, and it doesn't require a teacher to be patient, or to understand the topic deeply themselves (which most of our teachers don't because they take more education classes than science classes). http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/preparation.aspx

What often happens is that a teacher has to choose a small number of particularly controversial issues (of which biology has a lot) and do some kind of debate or critical thinking exercise, without necessarily coming to a conclusion (which would piss off parents) and spend the rest of their limited time lecturing on consensus facts, regardless of how immediately useful those facts are to that group of students. How many people really need to study protein synthesis and glycolysis multiple times over the course of their k-12 and college careers? They don't, but no-one is angry about the citrate cycle, except perhaps for the students, and their voices don't count.