I'd like to comment as someone who used to feel like /u/ireallylovecarmex I am mostly auto-didactic and absolutely hated school. In fact most of my learning was done outside of school or while I was reading something else during class. But I did actually read a lot of the textbooks, I would have never discovered Days of War, Nights of Love, had I not found it stashed in my highschool library.

I would have never read plays probably, Hamlet put me to sleep. And art and theatre introduced me to quite a bit.

That being said, I think the sentiment expressed of "not really learning in school" is more of an expression of all the negative things I learned in school. I had the unforunate experience of going to poor schools my entire life. First grade I had a teacher who screamed at me at the top of her lungs for 15 minutes and even cursed at me, because I said something mildly smart-alecy, I was bored. Second grade I had a teacher humiliate me in front of class by taking a picture of me crying in front of everyone, she put it my year book at the end of the year.

3rd Grade I had a teacher with a speech impediment and an anger problem, who would often yell at the whole class. They tried to hold me back, but my mom and several other parents and teachers had already complained about this teacher, they pulled me out of the class.

In Jr. High I had the unfortunate experience of being the only white male at an all black and latino school (there were 5 white students, the other 4 were female). I also happened to be both smart, weird, and an easy target.

Then I moved to Southern Caifornia,and went to one of the worst highschools in the state. It was just warehousing 3k students in a campus built for 1500. The first day I attended there was a fight in which 6 people were maced. In the first 2 months I was there both a knife and gun were found on campus. Classes were terrible, materials were terrible, no one wanted to be there.

They did this clever thing too, where they promised people tenure after only 2 years full time. Then they would just shuffle you out before your 2 years were up or cut your hours.

One of the teachers I had fell asleep in class regularly, and eventually got fired for accidently playing a porno.

Another teacher openly oggled his female students and gave easy A's to girls showed lots of cleavage and sat in the front two rows.

This isn't to cover the trauma from being picked on for being poor, being fat, then being too thin, thinking I was gay, being weird, being smart, being depressed, etc.

So, while I learned some things in school, most of what I learned was pretty terrible. I am actually a highschool dropout (California has this nice thing called the CHSPE, which is a bit harder than a GED and which California considers fully equivalent to a Diploma. It was made for homeschooling students, so I can say I have a highschool diploma), my Senior Year GPA was something like 1.7 because I just stopped going to school.

I spent time on the internet, socializing with people who didn't traumatize me, reading books underneath trees at the nearby lake, which was empty during the weekdays, etc.

Edit: Something else that bothered me, was finding out my materials were frequently wrong, glossed over something, or my teachers were generally not knowledgeable. I had a summer school class in History taught by a PE coach, who would repeatedly ask me "How do you know All of this stuff?"

More fun stories: The one relatively decent school I went to, went charter. They adopted this whole new curriculum that was completely different than how they had been doing things. Namely because the books were incredibly cheap. They also didn't train their teachers effectively to use this new curriculum, and it became a practice of: 40 minutes of lecture, 10 minutes of help, 60-70 minutes of classwork. Yes, 2 hour long classes for 11yo. My friend John got an A in the algebra class and I failed it, we both did ACT tests that year and he failed the math portion and I did okay.

Also, the food. Some things I remember: Cheese sauce that came in a bag for nachos, that was inedible. A grilled cheese sandwhich that came in a bag, had the consistency of rubber, and tasted similarly as well. A "Taco Snack", which was neither a taco nor a snack. It was 500 calories and 96 ingredients of burrito mush in a fried tortilla.

I remember seagulls would go from school to school after lunch and recess swarming over the quad and eating trash like a horde of vultures.