For example (taking the Japan, South Korea example): - Japan and Korea enjoy a certain (long standing) cultural attitude towards teachers that would render a super-sized classroom still manageable. - I can not imagine a student in Japan or Korea cursing their teacher when scolded for being late. + other unmentionables. Love to see a comparison of a typical class dynamics in say Andover vs your average public high school.
It would be better to pull problem kids from the productive classroom, and put them in a strict disciplinary program until they can earn their way out of it. Education is not a right for kids that don't behave.
Perhaps the root problem is not the classroom size, but rahter the scale of the socio-political unit.
Seriously. There are efficiciencies of scale, and then there are inefficiencies of scale. Sometimes we shouldn't enforce standardization not because the standards aren't good, but because implementing them isn't efficient.