I wasn't a bad writer in school but I always found it hard to reach the minimum number of words required in a essay. I can write and could write coherently about anything I have anything to say but I despise having to cough up filler sentences to reach an arbitrary number of words. I know some bloggers on Hive whose bread and butter it seems to ramble on to fulfill what seems like a quota they have set for themselves. It seems to be working well. Curators probably find themselves wishing that the post ended in the middle of them and press upvote to get it over with. :D

(You are not among these. You're pretty skilled at breaking up your posts into paragraphs that express an idea succinctly and making up good headlines for your paragraphs.)

As a social environment school sucked. But I don't recall the academic subjects being that so bad. Some of the stuff was rather interesting and the three foreign languages I had were very useful to learn, English in particular. I didn't mind math, either.

We usually had choice when it comes to topics for our essays. Sometimes you'd have to write a book review about a book. We could usually pick any novel from a library out of some broad category and write a review of that.

I think it an exaggeration to say that school is not about learning but conformity. It's obviously about both. You do learn many useful basic skills and basic information without which you'd be pretty helpless and/or easily conned.