@Background Pony #AADC  
Season 10 needs the Tree of Harmony to be both the main antagonist and protagonist through completely innocent and ignorant means.

To be fair… they actually asked the tree to help them study.  
Well Gallus did anyway  
Well he did sarcastically
 
Look it’s a tree, it’s trying its best.

The tree moves in mysterious ways

Hmmm… Yep. Sounds like Twilight’s influencing the Tree.

@QueenCold  
If I had a penny for everytime Twilight forgets everything about all her lessons about friendship, I would be a very rich man.
 
I’ve always wondered why they have such a backwards delivery with Twilight. Everyone praises her that she knows more about friendship then everything else, but she’s the first to be a blank slate in that area (the whole idea that the main character needs to be a blank slate doesn’t really work when any continuity is involved), and outside one or two Amending Fences episodes, they make it clear that she is clinically more dependent on authority figures then acting out of friendship, and will only quote friendship when its easy or put into a situation where that’s the only choice.
 
Skin deep, she’s a really good friend, which is great.  
Deep, Deeper and Deeper Down, she’s actually a pile of weak-willed, brown nosing neurosis that forgets about her friendship lesson ALL THE TIME.  
Deepest down, she’s actually a somewhat good person, but we rarely get to see that side of her since, as to quote Twilight in Amending Fences, actually confronting her issues fully is harder then fighting Tirek or all the other evils.

@Background Pony #E8F2
 
It’s either that, or you get some uncomfortable questions about what’s really at stake in the story.

because it takes time to learn the ancient Celestial craft of handing your problems to others!!!

Eh, the ponies that created it have been roaming the land since. The tree said it itself, it changes as it grows.

@PonyPon  
Hmm, now I read those description stories, and they seemed alright. Concise, no pushing political agenda, no manipulative scandalous journalistic style (“Think of the children! To the jail with her!”). Contrast is great.

@PonyPon  
Shh… Don’t let them know that coming up with characters, scenarios and fake screencaps that fool people into thinking they are real requires writing.

@Background Pony #214E  
She does have backstory to quite a few of her pictures.

@Background Pony #214E  
Normally I consider being directly or indirectly told that I am not socially competent an insult. On Derpibooru I consider it a compliment.
 
Inb4 getting censored for wrongspeak.

@QueenCold  
I actually read all your posts. From that, I can say one thing: thank goodness that you’re an artist, and not a writer. If you’re expecting me to quote your every sentence, and answering each with a paragraph, then you quoting every my sentence, creating the line of spaghetti posts, sorry to disappoint, not going to do that. I’ve seen it happening too many times.

@Background Pony #214E  
You know what is an even better bonding experience, not just according to me but according to science? Deciding what you do with your friends. They were forced into an unpleasant situation and are only bonding over how unpleasant they all think that situation is, except maybe Ocellus. There’s other, better ways to bond that don’t kill your enthusiasm for learning. By being forced to do an activity that has nothing to do with their interests, the only thing they learned about each other was how much they hate this stuff, which they already know.  
If instead of giving the students one day to prepare for a test about Equestrian history, told from an Equestrian perspective (and it sure is smart to talk to these kids about this stuff before their own kind can. Kinda helps the whole ‘greater good’ goal along, y’know?) Twilight would just set these kids free to roam not only on school grounds, but in Ponyville as well, they’d learn a lot more about friendship because that would come out of a natural desire to socialize. If that desire is absent there is no point. They’d also be exposed to a lot more potential friends.
 

 
When you are forced by the government to spend most of your waking hours in one location, where do you think most of your social interaction happens? Not to mention that this bonding doesn’t happen during class because kids are literally not allowed to interact in class unless told to. There’s a reason why most kids stop being friends with each other when they stop going to school with each other. They are no longer in that awful situation together so their different interests lead them onto different paths that rarely cross again. Honestly, that was a really dumb argument.
 
Your headcanon isn’t canon. The show has done nothing to suggest that the lessons aren’t the focus. Most times we saw the students they were in class. we didn’t get to see them leave school grounds either and none of them have friends outside the school.  
Even if they were in the background, it doesn’t matter. When it comes to the natural progression of friendship, compulsory activities and controlled environments are always inferior to letting people just do whatever and decide who they do it with. The classes are an obstacle.
 

 

 

 
See? Deep down even you get it.
 

 
It is exactly how it works and if you don’t believe me, just ask anybody with a degree in psychology.

@QueenCold  
That’s the whole point. Cramming for a test is a valuable bonding experience (I’m sure Twilight already wrote an article about that), and it actually worked (well, until Cozy Glow intervened).
 
Like it or not, school is the place where friendship forms in most young people. You seems to not realize that lessons are background, and most important moments are happening on breaks. You take a few isolated WTF-teacher moments and use it to ‘prove’ that the whole school idea is bad, while using lots and lots of water to buff your posts. It doesn’t work that way.

@Derpyfan  
Sure it was.

@PonyPon  
Shota Aizawa would beg to differ.

@PonyPon  
You’re forgetting what the tree itself told Gallus before he and his friends escaped; ‘It was you who chose what you saw in my roots, not me’, so basically Gallus put himself in that situation, not the tree.

@Stotter  
That’s still not how you perk up kids.

@PonyPon  
A thought occurs to me, the “life-threatening” situation Gallus was in, I think the changing ratio of colored lights may have been rigged so that it couldn’t harm him, and figuring out how they work was inevitable.  
Yeah, still threatening, as distinct from risking, but somewhat unavoidable when confronting fear. They face convincingly simulated threats to better prepare for potential real threats.

To your really stupid question, OP: it was Destiny. The Tree has clearly been acting deliberately across the series. And finally, No one would have learned anything if Literally God did it all for them.

Quite literally told in the episode “As I’ve grown, so have my abilities.”

Well tree isn’t surprise

@Daneasaur  
I wouldn’t say they’ve learned “nothing” from the classes themselves, at the very least the classes are teaching the historical events and magical means by which the idea of friendship has influenced many important events. And the school itself has provided a location where the various species that would normally not interact can live in close proximity.
 
And some of the classes certainly seem to teach things well, even if only by observation. Like the events in “The End in Friend.” We can’t judge a lot of them though as we haven’t actually seen a lot of the classes/lessons in action.

@gingerninja666  
That’s not necessarily evidence of it being able to see the future. The tree is able to detect friendship problems and where they’re happening so if it’s able to see what the problem is then it could tell who to send based on that.