Art class for children, NOT a success!

I was really not expecting this one... the boys do a lot of (messy) arty stuff in the mornings, they love mixing paints to finger (and foot) paint and adore play dough, which we make ourselves. As I'm often doing something else when they're at the table being artistic, I though it might be fun for all three of us to go to a creative arts class for children. Well... we found one nearby which seemed to be what we wanted, on the website there were lots of pictures of kids covered in paint, lots of words like creative, messy play, exploration, different mediums, etc.
So off we went, very excited. We were slightly surprised at the (vaguely deranged) lady in charge sitting everyone in a circle and singing songs and shaking hands with the children, but who are we to judge? Although with only a 45 minute session maybe we should have just got stuck in. Reuben at this point was still very hopeful so off we go to the table, and here much frustration ensued. The activity had been decided for us (a Xmas snowman card) and we could only use certain materials (and certain colours) in a specific order so things were given to us and taken away throughout. Reuben was very upset by this as he wanted to work out for himself what would work/look nice. For example, we were supposed to stick things on the snowman's face but Reuben wanted to paint the face instead and of course the madwoman had taken the paints away as they were only supposed to be for the background not the snowman... so you can imagine what it was like. And I won't even mention Isaac being forced to sit at a table for 45 minutes without much scope for messing about.
10 minutes from the end Reuben stood up and said: "I don't like this playgroup, I want to go home!" the lady looked at me and said: "I suppose you won't be coming back then?" eeehhhh... no....

Moral of this story? One of the mums put it quite nicely: "This class is great, it prepares them for school". Really? It prepares them for being brain dead? Not once in the whole class was a child encouraged to explore or be creative in any way, it was like little robots being made to do what the adult had decided they were going to do, and in a specific order. I mentioned Reuben being upset by the materials being taken away and the woman in charge said: "If I didn't do that we wouldn't get anything done". Done? What do you mean? Wouldn't it have been better to show the card to the children, put all the materials on the table at the beginning and let them decide how to do it, and if they wanted to do something else entirely, why not? It ended up with the parents doing much of it anyway. So it certainly wasn't art or creative. Is this indicative of most children's classes? I hope not but I have a terrible suspicion that most will be like this, and of course everyone looked at us as if we were mad, as my children aren't mindless sheep who will be forced to do mindless things.