@QueenCold  
I have little doubt that it does. It’s merciless in what it has to teach, and yes, the students have learned… nothing in regards to the classes themselves. Only when they broke out of the classes did they learn anything, namely the bonding and friendship that twilight THINKS she knows something about.
 
I honestly think the school aspect is part of the marketing blunder of “you will put [obnoxious thing] in the show to sell toys. Write around it.” Amusingly, this episode heavily showcased that it’s a complete failure.

They should’ve called it the Tree of a Convenience

@Background Pony #19D6
 
If only there were a way to go back a day and prevent that from happening…

It was nice of the tree to help Starlight and bring her into the group.
 
It was the tree that allowed the time travel in order to help Starlight. Then got rid of the scroll after it succeeded.

@thps48  
I was just about to say dealing with this tree has become eerily the same as trying to figure out Celestia years ago.

@gingerninja666  
@PonyPon  
@QueenCold  
Congratulations, you win a free “discussion in the comments” tag.

Didn’t that entire episode take place in the basement or something similar?  
That whole cave or whatever it was, was totally crystal like…  
What if the tree of harmony cannot project herself outside of that cave?  
Like she has full power over that crystal cave, but couldn’t go for a stroll on the surface if she wanted to?  
She used her crystal roots to open the gate leading down to the crystal cave, grew the castle and the friendship map, but I’m guessing crystal-tree stuff is the limit to what she can do on the surface.

The Tree doesn’t do jack. The Bearers use the accumulated magic of Harmony for Her. She’s as much a guide as Celestia. :T

@PonyPon
 
Well, there has been some evidence that the tree can very accurately predict the future. Given the events of Griffonstone, A Royal Problem, Viva Las Pegasus. All of which involve the tree exploiting people’s very specific flaws in order to get a situation to go a specific way.

@PonyPon  
I guess it depends on whether or not the tree has a sense of premonition.

@QueenCold  
That’s all a very good dissection of the show’s current happenings.
 
My only point of disagreement is the intention of the tree. It seems more to me like it’s taking Twilight’s idea and vamping it up and over the line.
 
Remember, it put them in these life-threatening situations because they were disheartened but Cozy’s racist tirade. Just disheartened. A little put down, and the tree went full Reeducate Xeno-Scum.exe on them.
 
I honestly wish i could trust the tree like you do.

@gingerninja666  
The case of the Hearthswarming Club is completely inexcusable even from an adult point of view. But you must remember that the target audience consists of many children in the age group that have a particularly hard time being away from their families for just a few days, even when there are no holidays involved. So while it may not seem like much to you, this kind of punishment is absolutely monstrous to a young child.  
In the real world this would have landed at least Twilight in prison, in the MLP universe it would have resulted in a world war if the previous actions of the other leaders are anything to go by. You don’t withhold children’s contact with their families as a punishment. There’s a whole host of things Twilight could have done to prevent that entire situation, but I’m not going to discuss that episode in detail here. I will say that it is the one thing that held the entire episode back.
 
You said that “you can be taught guidelines that can be used or discarded at the discretion of the one learning it”, but this doesn’t work for two reasons: A. there are no defining guidelines for friendship, so teaching them is pointless; B. the students are taught in a way that gives them no reason to think they can discard what they are taught at their discretion.  
You really do fail to see the point. Literally any interference with the natural progression of a friendship is an interference, no matter how you dress it up. Friendships aren’t genuine if the people involved do not have complete freedom to mold their interactions and require - or at least seem to require - others to sanction any of its details. Once you implement handing down standards to judge friendship by, you have failed. At that point it becomes dictated. And dictating is what we see a lot in this school. The students are being lectured and taking notes as if they are studying something that you can learn from a book when this is something you need to absolute freedom to explore yourself.  
If the students had freedom of movement you may have had a point, but they don’t. They are confined and extremely limited in what they may do and who they interact with. “Skipping” class is a thing. That alone proves it isn’t a school of friendship.
 
I am not reading too much into their distaste for the work they are given when they outwardly express it in multiple episodes and wish to avoid it when possible.
 
You say that you don’t think Twilight is trying to teach the kids “this is objectively the only way you can ever be friends.” But what she’s trying to do is irrelevant when it isn’t what she’s doing. She has broken friendship down into a step-by-step plan, as evidenced by her gushing over the Friendship University guidelines. Let me reiterate this: friendship with standardized guidelines of any kind handed down by an authority figure is disingenuous. This is one of the many contradictions in this season. Twilight’s reasoning is all over the place and so is the narrative of this whole season.
 
Twilight’s school of friendship was born out of the patronizing idea that her added perspective is necessary in order to introduce more ponies and specifically all other creatures to the concept of friendship, and that she knows exactly how to teach them this. The non-pony creatures flip-flop between being completely socially inept and being able to be ‘just as good as ponies’ (nice lesson in diversity, eh?) depending on what the plot needs them to be, while all of their societies are portrayed as objectively worse and in need of the guidance of ponies, but not the other way around. Yet Neighsay’s position is supposed to be irrevocably bad. The biggest difference between him and Twilight is that he wishes to preserve Equestria’s culture by excluding others while Twilight’s wishes to export their culture for ‘the greater good’. Neither of them realize their arrogance and the show can’t even decide whether or not they are both right.  
The writers are dancing around the elephant in the room and it has has resulted in bungled writing that sends mixed messages and hurts Twilight’s character in particular.  
It has made it more obvious than ever before that you are supposed to side with the protagonists simply because they are the protagonists and nothing else, which is a problem that has been very persistent in the later seasons and made people hate certain episodes in earlier seasons.
 
It being a show for kids isn’t an excuse for these glaring issues. The kids may take anything at face value, but family friendly shows are meant to provide different kinds of enjoyment to different kinds of audiences, with the older ones being able to analyze the content to enjoy it more fully. The show used to be good and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be good now. Yes, kids will watch and enjoy it, but they’ll also watch and enjoy something that was well-written and treats its entire audience with respect.
 
But before I rest my case, let’s go back to the tree. As I said, the tree felt the need to interfere with Twilight’s lessons because it not only recognized the uselessness of these lessons in the grand scheme of things, but was probably also aware of Cozy Glow’s intentions. The tree decided Twilight was incompetent enough to warrant a personal intervention to ensure that the students were prepared for something Twilight wasn’t preparing them for. It gives me a spark of hope that some of the writers do realize how completely backwards and asinine the school of friendship is.

Like most gods, it’s super selective and not very conveniency minded.

 
Well, the Elements did cast the spell…
 
Maybe we have seen it before, just not with an actual physical form that wasn’t the Tree.

@QueenCold
 
I’m just saying, none of the tests that we’ve seen the students taking have really related to social interaction. It’s always been about history that’s RELATED to friendship, or the specific magical things associated with it. What are the elements? Who is Twilight? Stuff like that. At least so far, they haven’t really portrayed Twilight as giving them cram tests on how they should handle relationships.
 
I’d even argue that the homework Twilight gave in Marks for Effort encourages the students TO think by themselves. The assignment was to do something nice for each pony. She didn’t say what to do or how to do it. It was up to the students.
 
And I think you’re reading too much into them finding the revision “boring”. They do but it’s also a running gag that Gallus is actually listening and pays attention to a fair few things in class. They make a song and dance of finding studying boring because they’re kids and that’s what kids do. But the act of studying itself was leading to a lot of good will and banter between them. It was just undercut by Cozy, who’s clearly manipulative and trying to mess with them.
 
I think you can be taught at least some semblence of social things. At least you can be taught guidelines that can be used or discarded at the discretion of the one learning it. That’s the idea of Twi’s looser curriculum. Her friends, in this show’s lore from the very beginning, quite literally define certain qualities that the show considers objectively the core aspects of friendship. Generosity, Kindness, all that. They try to communicate these concepts in their own ways. They’re giving the students an added perspective.
 
I think that’s the main difference for me. I don’t think Twilight is trying to teach the kids “this is objectively the only way you can ever be friends.” Because she already admitted in School Daze that that’s not how it works. She said that the Student 6 became friends even without their teachers. It seems to me like she’s just trying to give them added perspective and skills on top of that. Introduce them to concepts they might not be aware of. I don’t think you can flunk out of this school or be kicked out under normal circumstances. The only one who ever hinted at that is Cozy. Who increasingly has every motive to lie.
 
And in the case of the Hearthswarming Club, Twi and RD heavily imply that they knew it was Gallus all along. The whole situation was them trying to encourage Gallus to confess on his own, without them needing to embarass him in front of his friends.

@gingerninja666  
Elaborating on this: even though the remaining 5 choose activities the students find more fun, the fact remains that these are activities of the teachers’ choice, not the students, making this more of a friendship simulation than a natural environment. The students are not free to leave, or choose their own activities, or even who they interact with. Their behavior is also influenced by the presence of an authority figure. Fun or not, the entire situation is still compulsory rather than a result of a natural progression of friendship and their actions are judged by a standard not set by their peers.
 
If the students were free to form friendships naturally, they would choose who they interact with, within or outside the school, based on their personalities, opinions and interests. If there is a foundation for a friendship based on these criteria, the students would then consent to and plan their own activities that reflect their true selves. Without accountability to an authority figure with a friendship rule book, peers would establish and enforce their own rules, forming a social bond on their own terms.  
This is a far cry from situations like the ‘spellvenger hunt’, where the students are told: “okay kids, here’s your designated friend for the day and here’s what you’re going to do together.”

“You called?”
 

Just because it can project a form to communicate with others does not mean it can physically interact with things.

@gingerninja666  

 
This is the headmare, who teaches a significant chunk of the classes and whose idea it was to have this school. Remember, in Friendship University she even lauded Flim and Flam’s curriculum until she learned they’d copied it from her and they were charging for the lessons. Twilight has been shown numerous times during this season to attempt to standardize friendship and teach things only loosely related. Sometimes even that is a stretch. She has proven herself to be utterly incompetent on top of it all, not only failing to see how her abuse of compulsory powers is directly interfering in the lives of the remaining 5, but also proving her lack of worth as an educator in other instances; like when she nearly held the student six hostage for the entire duration of a holiday break, including everyone’s equivalent to Christmas, despite these children having been at this boarding school since that summer, and all this over an easily cleaned mess caused by one of them; or when she wouldn’t even let the CMC tell their side of the story after Cozy Glow intentionally failed her test.
 
But none of that even matters. What you seem to fail to understand is that it doesn’t matter whether or not the other classes are more fun. What matters is that these students are in classes at all, following a curriculum… to learn friendship. This is not what should be happening. True friendship is fostered in uncontrolled environments where the people involved aren’t told what to do, not in the controlled aspects of a school environment.

Well, she did say that her powers have grown over time. Maybe she just couldn’t before?

Wait for it

@gingerninja666  
They are often seen doing homework and in What Lies Beneath cramming for a test that was announced one day in advance is precisely what they are doing.

@QueenCold
 
Wasn’t the cram type stuff what Twilight rejected with the EEA? In School Daze that was the whole problem. The students found the classes boring because the Mane 6 were being forced to teach them in a very dry way. That’s why they started to skip class. Twilight eventually shook off the EEA by allowing the Mane 6 to teach however they wanted. Because each friendship is unique.
 
And in episodes like Marks for Effort we see that in action. The Remane 5 don’t teach standard looking lessons at all. The only cram test type stuff seems to come from Twilight’s classes. Which are more about history than friendship.

@QueenCold  
one of the most intelligent things I’ve read in a while

Even the tree of harmony knows that the friendship school is a failure both in concept and execution, so it actively interfered with its processes by devising a test that would actually help the students grow as individuals and strengthen their friendship rather than making them cram for a standardized history test à la American public school, which is widely recognized as one of the worst possible ways to teach, or encourage students to take a pro-active role in their education willingly, or to give them the freedom needed to socialize with peers as they would in an uncontrolled environment. Unfortunately the latter is absolutely necessary to form robust friendships, which is why the students only ever bonded when left to their own devices, without being given instructions by an authority figure who is monitoring their behavior and judging them in that very moment. The time they are allowed to do this is severely limited, which is one of the reasons they still don’t have established personalities. The students constantly complaining about their workload and trying to avoid work when possible - which they now associate with learning - is another obvious sign that the school is killing their enthusiasm and they see the school as more of a hindrance than as something helpful. Because it is.
 
This season Twilight has forgotten everything she’s learned about friendship in the first seven seasons in favor of being a huge nerd who thinks this type of top-down structure with fixed, one-size-fits-all rules for maintaining amicable relationships is effective, while having no regard for her friends’ wishes and personal lives as she simply mandates them to be teachers and I guess as the princess who apparently has ownership over friendship as a concept she gets to do that.
 
The tree knows what’s up.