alt Hacker NewsI do quantitative biology now, although my background is in theoretical physics. Biology is fascinating, but ultimately there is a cultural divide between the scientific "language" used in biology and the scientific language of e.g., engineers, physicists (very famously described in "Can a biologist fix a radio?" https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1535-6108%2802%2900...)
I do find the author's point weird. "I thought high school biology was just memorizing facts, but I began to appreciate it when I read some pop science books and went scuba diving." So the only problem for the author was the topic of the classes, not the style. Why shouldn't one have the same problem with high school physics ("it's just about boring ramps and pulleys"), etc.? Personally I find the style to be a more important distinguishing factor, in that biology is much less quantitative than other science disciplines. Instead the author's problem is that biology should be even less quantitative and more literary or poetic...?
Ultimately science journalism/popularization is not the same thing as science. High school science classes (try to) teach the latter not the former.
High school physics and chemistry equips students to make (a very limited set of) predictions. High school biology super doesn't. When you're learning chemistry and physics, it feels like you're learning a systematic set of rules that let you approximate and model the world around you. Biology...doesn't, not really. Life is just more complex and higher order, and it's that much harder to actually use the study of it to understand the world immediately around you in any meaningful way.
It's still super cool, but it makes learning about it as a science less satisfying, since it's less friendly to the standard scientific method.