I played classical piano too, but never learned scales. It seemed completely useless to me and I was still was able to pass. It still seems completely useless to me, to be honest. The # I am supposed to play are right there in the music sheet notation.

I did the same, and found out that it's a great way to paint yourself in a corner. In this corner you can learn very complex pieces by practicing learning them from the sheet music, but on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch, and it won't help at all with playing by ear, improvising or even much for playing from lead sheets. Yes, I was able to pass the exams by just knowing how scales work and coming up with fingerings on the fly, but in hindsight it wasn't the best idea.

If we did some improvising, it might be useful. We did no improvising at all, therefore it was just completely useless theory that had literally nothing to do with anything. I think that if they taught us some little improvising, we might see value in scales and maybe I would even ended up liking the piano more.

> on the other hand every new piece is an unique snowflake that you star learning from scratch

Not really. You still have memory of previous ones and you do hear how it sounds. The intuition builds up, so to say. You do learn to hear and distinguish what sounds good or bad. I kind of do not see how theoretical knowledge of the scales would help here.

But also I dropped out the first moment I could, so there is that too. But remembering the pieces was not issue at all. Issue was that I did not even liked music I had to play all that much and playing pieces you dont like much again and again to perfection is not exactly motivating.

> If we did some improvising, it might be useful.

Of course, it was the way back then. I've been told that it's changed a lot in the recent 10 or 20 years at least where I live. But the point is, even if they didn't teach improvising in the official lessons, the curriculum also didn't prepare us to do anything outside that narrow scope.

> playing pieces you dont like much again and again to perfection is not exactly motivating.

Sounds still better than half-assing a lot of pieces and then deciding that that's not it, let's try another one. It would have been nice to have some repertoire in playable shape for once.

> Sounds still better than half-assing a lot of pieces and then deciding that that's not it, let's try another one.

I dunno. It sounds like you got further, kept doing it for long and kept liking it.

I ditched it first time I could and never looked back. I was against my kids playing music instrument unless they would really really insist on it, because I felt like it is unpleasant activity I don't want to burden them with.

I don't know if I found them useful, but the program my parents put me in forced me to learn them.

Overall, I was pretty indifferent about my music education, it was just something my parents sort of made me do and I had to spend a few hours every week on, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about.

If all you want to do is play what's on sheet music, a player piano will do the job.

What would "all the scales" mean here?

Major and minor in every key (so C, c, C#, c#, D, d, etc.)

It means more than just that. There are multiple unique modes of minor, and advanced music exams will also bust out enharmonic requirements, playing in thirds and other things that requires very extensive practice.

Source: I’ve done several of these exams.

In this context, where the article speaks of "all 24 keys", it most certainly doesn't.

Usually for each minor key there are three minor modes they can request. That would be 48 different scales as a typical minimum. (not including other requests that are typically made of scale playing in these exams)