With all due respect, the open office educational analogy is the cafeteria study hall, with everyone walking around and gossiping and goofing off and basically getting nothing productive done other than putting on a show.

If the open office full of distractions is the ideal working environment, then when I get an emergency call from work, I assume I'll fix the emergency faster if I take my laptop to the neighborhood daycare center and sit down right in the highest chaos room. Oddly enough at home when no pretensions are necessary because there is nobody to show off to, people who have to actual work, pick a nice quiet closed door "office".

A lot of open office love comes from utterly incompetent management and its very politically incorrect to discuss this other than semi-anonymous forums like this. "I have no idea how to manage these people or how to convince them to do what I want, but at least I can see them all squashed together like sardines". If your standard of performance is low enough, mere visibility is at least better than nothing.