WALT's and LO's - What are your thoughts?

In education today, we are constanlty being asked to share with our students the learning outcomes and WALT's for what they are learning.  We are even expected to have the students write these into their books.

If I think back to when I was in school, we never had this and yet we still knew what we were learning.

I believe if students are inspired by what they are learning, they automatically know the relevance and purpose.  I wonder if giving students WALT's and LO's in writing that we are stifling the creativity of our students.  I also think it places a ceiling on the students learning. 

We spend (waste) far too much time sharing these at the beginning of every lesson and for what purpose?  For the students to be able to parrot it back without actually getting any meaning from it.  And who said that what we have shared with them is what they are actually learning.  That may be what the teacher wants them to learn but each student brings their own prior knowledge and beliefs to a task and this impacts on what they take away and learn.
This page from Teaching Notes from the Front Line by Debra Kidd backs this up and calculates the time wasted.

So, I have been thinking, are we doing this for our students or as a way of providing evidence of what we are teaching.  Where has the trust gone????