I think my education involved a lot less rote learning than yours. There were a few years and classes where I had quite a bit of that, but I didn't have to deal with an excess of rote learning spoiling my fun to the extent that you did (probably because I was in gifted classes all the way through).

I think the biggest difference between my education and yours, though, was that I never had any experience that communicated to me that grades did not necessarily reflect learning. I worked as hard as I could for my grades, on the assumption that how well I learned the material would determine what grade I got. Generally that assumption proved correct, though I had the occasional teacher with unfair expectations.