If you had always been free to learn, you would follow your natural tendency to find out as fully as possible about the things that interest you, cars or stars. We are all born with what they call "love of learning," but it dives off into an elusive void when we go to school.
After all, school does not help you focus on what you love, because it insists that you devote equal time to six or so "subjects." While interviewing an unschooled actress for [our newsletter], editor Susannah Sheffer made an astute observation: "It's funny that people think kids should be well-rounded but don't seem to have the same expectations of adults. Adults seem to realize you can't do everything." In Walden, Thoreau laments, "Our lives are frittered away by detail," and admonishes, "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand."
Of course, quitting school doesn't guarantee that you are going to learn more in every subject than you did in school. If you hate math in school, and decide to continue studying it outside of school, it's possible that you won't enjoy it any more or learn it much better , although being able to work without ridicule at your own speed will help. You will see a dramatically wonderful change in the way you learn about the things that interest you. What's more, you will find out that you are interested in things that haven't yet caught your attention, and that you can love at least some of the things which repulsed you in school.
Beyond the love and pursuit of something specific, there's another quality you might also call love of learning. It's simple curiousity, which kills more tired assumptions than cats. Some people move around with their ears and eyes perked open like raccoons, ready to find out something new and like it. Do everthing you can to cultivate this charcteristic; it will enliven your life immeasurabley