Anyways, the point I'm making is that your experience was just being unlucky with the quality of the professors you got and the style of teaching they favored.
I think the problem is that experience is pretty common (at leat for my experience in the US). I only learned to love math later in life because I started getting interested in physics, and then I realized that math wasn't rote memorization.
Did he say that? I remember him saying the opposite: "Nothing would fundamentally change"