Was your hatred of school similar to Ronan's hatred of school? Is that why you dropped out? Did you even hate school?
Once, when I was ten or so, my parents sent me to a new school in the middle of school year. I was small and neurotic and OCD and I spent the lunch hour of the first day sitting quietly at a table drawing and hoping no one would bother me. On the second day, a boy sat down beside me. He held out a hand for my notebook of drawings and I gave it to him. With a smile, he drew penises on all of my animals and gave it back to me.
Hate is the wrong word, because hate is an active, noisy thing. You can burn out on hate. And in any case, it didn’t occur to me, for a long time, that there was any other option. It was like being born in pain and not realizing that wasn’t just the way life was. I liked learning things I wanted to learn and I didn’t understand rules and school had no interest in helping me out with either of those things. Hate? School made me tired.
When I hit sixth grade, my parents decided to home school my siblings and me since we moved so much. I basically rolled my brain around over textbooks for four years and set my own schedule and wrote thirty novels in my spare time. This was better, if lonesome. I felt like I was waiting for real life to begin; when did I get to do something with what I was learning?
At 16, I decided that I wasn’t going to wait any longer to start life. High school was pointless and I wasn’t going to do it. I was just going to go to college. I imagined it as a glorious institution of hungry minds, rooms of teens sitting together in smoking jackets discussing economic theory, English majors puzzling over poetry in arcane late-night meetings, students grasping for the exciting connections between chemistry and history and art and music. College. Yes. Good. Yes. Strings were pulled, tests were taken, colleges were applied to, high school was skipped, college at 16 was a go.
By 19, I was standing outside the history building looking at the noticeboard to see if our band’s flier had gotten covered up yet. Someone had drawn a cock and balls on each piece of paper tacked up.
I still felt like I was waiting for real life to begin. I felt like no one else had come to college to learn a damn thing. I felt like I was surrounded by children who made everything about sex, and not even interesting sex. I felt like I was working my ass off to afford this stupid place, and other people couldn’t be bothered to show up to class because they were too busy drawing dicks on my goddamn flier. I felt one thousand years old, trapped in a teenage body.
And now that I knew there were non-school options, I hated it. Properly hated it. And it turns out that hate is a terminal illness and it did in fact nearly kill me.
I quit. I was dragged back by my parents. I quit again; my advisor talked me into sticking it out. On graduation day, I took an extra shift at my job, skipped the ceremony, and had the school mail my diploma to my parents.
The short answer to you question is: yes. I love education, I hate school.