Absolutely agree.

My son has been learning Japanese voluntarily for about a year. Now he is registered for the upper class at his school. There, it cannot officially be chosen as a foreign language, so we asked the head of department if we could find a teacher/tutor who would check his learning level and include his preferred foreign language in the curriculum instead of Spanish or French. Of course, we received the answer that this is not possible.

However, I told my son that one should never give up immediately and always formulate one's own interest and argue if possible. It always happens that people can be convinced with good arguments. I am someone who is in favour of exceptions and special cases, because it is always these that initiate minor and major changes. If everyone always did everything the way it has been, .... well, you know the rest of the sentence.

In principle, most of my own life has been like that, working out exceptions, moving into areas for which I have not been officially trained, through self-study and the motivation to learn something on my own. In fact, we weren't taught this at school and I can't even say where I always got this cheek to see extra buns baked for me. I just tried and often it worked out.

But in fact, I also think, I probably never realised my full potential at all and needed many many years not to think I was stupid.

In contrast to my own school life, where at least the teachers did not constantly report to the parents of us pupils because of any academic weaknesses or even "social failures", I noticed with some surprise that at my son's school a so-called "planner" had to be kept from the beginning and this had to be countersigned weekly by the parents. In my view, this is a completely unnecessary and weak measure that shows how much control over learning and behaviour has come over the schools. I think there was a time in the 70s when this was different. But of course it always depends on individual cases and schools and teachers.

I banned it at some point that I will even respond to teacher's remarks in red letters (!) by seeking confrontation with the teacher. After that, there were never again such encroaching entries from him.