My public school isn't what encouraged me to start learning to program my small home computer when I was 14. Quite the opposite. Even with a lot less woke mess back when I was in school, there was still this push to conform to the system of focusing on classwork and assignments that were pretty much useless. By spending time doing those worthless assignments, I had less time to devote to studying the two main things that forever improved my life: 1) reading the Bible and getting to know God more, and 2) reading books and magazines on how to program my Commodore 64 (I just showed my age). I'm not saying my public school education had zero value. I'm just saying in the two main life changing things I was learning at the time (my new faith in Christ, and the skills I'd one day make a career out of), my high school public education was probably more of a distraction than home schooling would have been.
I’m roughly the same age.
Even when we were kids schools were about babysitting. Pity they weren’t honest about it so kids would realize that they should rely on something besides the curriculum,
I am a bit of a collector. I still have the first Commodore 64 that I purchased... it still works. I have quite a few other computers from the same time period. The challenge is getting the disk drives to work, and after sitting for about 40 years most of the floppies tend to be unreadable even if you are able to get the drives going.
I would add that any public schools that teach critical thinking skills would be anathema for their woke crap.
I learned and honed my critical thinking skills here at FreeRepublic! Woot Woot Woot!!!