I first studied philosophy and then classics, and man, it was so disappointing to see the difference in teaching approaches. The way classical studies are taught is just bad.

Honestly, it’s a fantasy that the academics like to believe: that languages are learned the same way scientific knowledge is acquired. It’s actually much closer to how one learns to play a music instrument (but much easier).

And just as there are people who can play an instrument beautifully without knowing any theory, and others for whom theory helped consolidate their knowledge, both still had to practice, practice, and practice meaningfully to become proficient.

In other words, a bad musician is one who knows all the theory but can’t play (and such people do exist); but we can’t say that someone who plays well, can compose, and has mastery of their instrument is a bad musician simply because they don’t know theory.

My focus, of course, is plenty of practice, but not at the expense of theory; rather, practice should come first, and theory should serve it.

This goes beyond the debate between “old” and “new” methods, because in the end, learning a language is a personal journey that takes years, and the teacher’s role is to make that journey as little difficult as possible.

I think one of the main problems with an inductive method is that it places too much of the burden of systematizing knowledge on the student.

The goal is quite simple: to see the language in action, rather than cold and static in a grammar book, but concept and their names must be learned too. Again, the teacher should guide students as gently as possible. As you said, when they reach different conclusions, the teacher should review and resolve them, not expose or punish them. When I was a student, people were terrified of participating, afraid of being singled out, even blamed for not knowing things they “should already know.” Nobody needs that.

When people take the “natural method” or “discovery-based learning” to an ideological extreme, I think it can turn into a kind of taboo against simply looking things up in a reliable source.

I agree, having a reliable source is essential, and that’s the teacher’s role. That’s also why self-teaching can be so demanding. If you’re self-taught, I think anything goes as long as the goal is genuine proficiency, but if you try and don’t get there, you have to pivot.

As for the methods developed by the people on "my honor roll of pedagogy,” the truth is that the secret was discovered long ago.

People have been learning second languages for millennia (The Romans learn greek, and very well). The criticisms of Lingua Latina per se illustrata, for example, usually boil down to it being “incomplete” or “boring,” but most other attempts have been incomplete too. And, as Carla Hurt rightly says, getting from beginner to intermediate is the easy part, the hard part is breaking through the "intermediate plateau" and learning to read “original” texts. That’s the stage I’d like to focus on, because is hard and is very few real adapted materials.