I have a somewhat similar, though critically different, story. For much of school I wasn't very engaged in formal learning. I didn't hate it, but it didn't hol

I have a somewhat similar, though critically different, story. For much of school I wasn't very engaged in formal learning. I didn't hate it, but it didn't hold my attention, and the drudgery was boring. I would often not do homework and slack off on projects. As a consequence of this when I entered high school I was put on the advanced track on math and nothing else. To the everlasting credit of my adolescent self I realized this was a problem and I set about fixing it. I tested into the advanced English track for my sophomore year and I figured out how to get onto the advanced science track as well. I ended up graduating near the top of my class and I earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics after only 2 years of college. Nevertheless, as much learning as I accomplished through school I achieved about the same level on my own. I read about what interested me. I read magazines (like Scientific American back when they were good) and even textbooks for fun. I was supposed to have taken a biology class in high-school prior to entering AP biology but I never could fit it into my schedule, so I didn't. And despite that I was still at the top of that class, often scoring the highest on tests. Because so much of that material was stuff I had learned on my own. But I got lucky. If I had attended a different high school with different teachers or if I hadn't had the insight to realize that it was important to invest in my education or if my personality had been slightly different things would have turned out much different. I might have even dropped out. And I can't help but wonder how many other smart people have been ill served by the school system because they weren't so lucky. Edit: as an aside, as I grow older I've become more and more disillusioned with formal education. I see the skills that the system instills in students and in many cases I'm of the opinion that those skills would be better not to have (the worst variety of competitiveness, concentration on minutiae and policy) while at the same time doing a poor job of instilling actual knowledge, problem solving skills, and so on.