This perfectly describes my experience too. My learning style is to 'ride the wave' of curiosity where i am obsessed with something and keep digging into it. Uni learning was antithetical to this learning style with strict schedules and tests. I got mostly As and some Bs by doing what you did but i didn't learn much of anything.
My son is somewhat like me and feel kind of sad to see him at a university to earn a living. I feel disappointed that i didn't provide him enough financial freedom to really gain enjoyment from learning istread of grinding at a uni.
For me, two use cases of "digging" come up a lot: 1. I want to know how the concept I'm learning can connect with other concepts that I'm interested in (i.e., related concepts); 2. I want to know what other materials are available out there that can provide different perspectives (i.e., related resources). So I ended up building a map visualizing concepts (https://afaik.io/) where the proximity indicates relatedness and under each concept there are various resources attached.
In addition to those more "objective" connections, I think what AI could really help is to find a more "subjective" connection that's very user-specific and utilize those connections to build a personalized tutoring experience, hence the adaptability. For now, I think the barrier to realizing that level of adaptiveness is the high hallucination rate.
I loved kindergarten and first and second grades which mostly seemed to be play. I think it was effective for me as far as creativity and socialization goes.
From third grade through high school I was bored with most of the material. A lot of it was not interesting and sometimes the pace was too slow.
At university, the work load was too high. I think if I had taken six years to complete the 4 year program, I would have been a lot better off. Too often I didn’t have the time to really dig into the material and explore related ideas (side quests). Instead I settled for memorization which was enough to do well on exams. My GPA at graduation did not reflect my command of the material.
Like Andy, I think an AI-powered course of learning could be great. The strength, I think, would be its adaptability. If while learning topic A I stumble across an interesting idea, it would have no problem with changing course and running down topic B.