sobisedovanie

[SANDRO43]

Sounds as if your teachers did not stress substance and creativity. 

The latter were not much fashionable in the 1950s - when I did most of my pre-Uni schooling - and our teachers were mostly concerned with cramming stuff into our tender brains.

It's the eternal and rather spurious debate of form vs. content - you can't really have one without the other . Nowadays our Uni professors are constantly complaining about students making appalling blue mistakes in the language of their written tests .
 

How did you survive with your vivid imagination?

I was too busy scraping through our countless oral and written tests to worry about that .