This might come across as a very strange question but is it uncommon to find engineers who did not enjoy school or think highly of the schools that they attended? I have encountered numerous computing and IT types over the years who did not enjoy school or had bad experiences at school but very few electrical or mechanical engineers.
I'm a Chartered Engineer and I hated every moment of being at school (one boy's grammar school, and one public school). The teachers and children colluded to be unremittingly cruel every day. I just wanted to learn in peace, but the school wouldn't teach me any of the things I wanted to learn about.
My only sources of interesting knowledge were my father who was an electronics teacher, and the free Open University programs that they used to broadcast on BBC2 early in the morning in the late 1970's.
The school's official policy on computers was that "computers are a passing fad", and it was only reluctantly that they allowed me to take time out to start studying A-level computer science (a year early), for which I had to walk across town to the Technical college to listen to an actual computer science teacher.
When I eventually got to University I almost wept for joy to discover that the students and lecturers were actually nice, with actual human empathy and everything, and that learning fun things and making cool stuff was actually encouraged. I devoured the knowledge being offered, obtained a 1st class hons degree in "Cybernetics & Control Engineering, with Mathematics as a subsidiary subject", and I have been happy ever since.
