What did I get out of Public School? in A Childhood Lost

I went to my cousin’s kids birthday party this weekend, and it was incredibly sad.
Her kids are 6, 8, and 13. The eldest is a very intelligent girl. She’s smart, sociable, affable, funny, and very responsible. She looks after her 2 younger siblings like a parent. Which breaks my heart. No child should be parentified. It’s a horrible way to spend childhood. Her mother (my cousin) is constantly putting her down, ignoring, dismissing her, giving orders, and insulting her in front of me and others. I can only imagine how this girl is treated when no one else is around.
I was getting coffee the other day and I overheard a mother giving her youngish (under 10) age child a cold chocolate milk, threatening him in a viscous tone “I swear to God if you spill this I will never get you one again!” Completely perplexing. Do you people expect love and respect from your kids for this kind of treatment? How hypocritical and horrible can you be before you break your kids? Is that your goal? Did you know that your kids have no choice but to rely on you for their most basic survival? Why the fuck did you have a kid?

School was always mind numbingly boring. I had to get up before the sun, stand outside in the freezing cold to wait for the bus, spend an hour or sometimes more on a bus driven by a minimum wage moron (not an insult to minimum wage workers, she was literally too stupid to get any other kind of job), suffer through several unqualified, some dedicated, and a few very mean, teachers, and repeat the bus ride home. Unless there was some after-school activity, which I actually tried to do because I was loathe to go home, then I was usually left at the school grounds until dark, when my dad realized he’d forgotten to pick me up again.
It was day after day and week after week, year after year, of soul crushing, spirit killing, de-motivating hell. I wasn’t present for most of it. By that I mean, I was physically present, but mentally I was off somewhere else. And Emotionally I could be said to have barely existed at all. It was not like a coma. It was like a small wisp of a ghost that sometimes might try to shake the cupboards like a very timid poltergeist.
Everyone usually speaks of a special teacher or adult in their life that took some sort of special interest in them. Some kind soul that saw something special in them and decided to try to culture that- to guide them into their greatness.
I think I witnessed this for some of my peers. I had a friend who almost shared my birthday- only 2 days apart. She was a very gifted artist. Her parents were art teachers. Not at our school, of course. They taught at better schools than they deigned to send their own daughter to. Our art teacher, though, he always had the most gracious praise for her. He was always giving her the most challenging projects. He was always allowing her to use the best supplies. He went out of his way to criticize her work more thoroughly, to give her more nuanced feedback, and to guide her through those more challenging projects. I watched this in a sort of daze. I wondered, what made her so special? I tried hard to match her skill, but I never came close. I don’t think I really wanted to be good at art. I just wanted attention like she got.