It sounds like the social aspect was what really killed it for you, not necessarily the education you got.
I read, and understood most of, Cosmos while I was in elementary school. For me, the educational process of school certainly was toxic. I can see that it works for plenty of other people, but for many -- some like me -- it is extremely adversarial.
It took me years after graduation to relearn learning, and re-discover focused curiosity, and to recall again how to intelligently consider the accepted notions that many other people have.
To be more specific, public schools lack (among other things) any focus at all on critical thinking and problem-solving. There are simply not classes for those at most schools. At best, a few teachers try to work them in to their class here and there, but it's not taught the way that, say, mathematics is.
Science classrooms are another specific example: they tend to concentrate on printed material and multimedia, and the few "experiments" that students do are little more than facades for re-confirming whatever thing is being taught that week. There is very little there to teach investigation, or to drive intellectual curiosity.
I say this as someone that was fortunate enough to attend some of the best schools in the Bay Area at the time; I imagine that my experiences, mediocre and toxic as they were, were still quite a bit better than what the vast majority of students are exposed to.
This is not to say that I didn't have some brilliant and dedicated teachers, however. I remember several of them quite fondly, all the time.
Probably because most are well up the scale on what society regards as intelligence, and in the course of 12 or 16 or more years of schooling ran across teachers who weren't, or were otherwise obnoxious. Lord knows I ran across a few classics. You were fortunate, I gather, in your college; if you had such a good time in your primary and secondary schooling, you were very fortunate.
As to the general point, I am fascinated by the hard words that the learned find for the schools they attended. My best guess is that much of learning comes in short bursts, that this is necessarily the case, but that some of us infer that the whole experience could be at the peak level of intensity.
In regards to learning coming in short bursts, I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I feel like learning has been pretty consistent over time.
On the point of people being intelligent, maybe that's a bit arrogant to think you're better than the system b/c you think you're smart. Are you really that smart? (By you, I don't mean you, the poster. I mean the people who rebel against school b/c they believe they're just too good for it). And if these people are so smart, why do they hate school? Wouldn't they be just rocking their classes with little effort and moving on with their lives?
Thinking about your post now, I'm curious where people who had bad experiences went to school. Was it the entire school system, or a particular teacher or grade that made you hate it?
Why do so many people on HN love to disparage school? Did they have horrible experiences? I had an incredible experience and learned an amazing amount of stuff. I almost never felt like I had to "put up with shit" to get a degree, or anything along those lines. Maybe I'm the exception, but I doubt that's the case.