I think there is a misconception here about what it means to be taught by and learned from other animators to join their ranks. It is the same process as how writing classes are taught and this is not a coincidence because both disciplines are very much the same; they teach intellectual clarity and concepts and the instructors point to samples of the good and the not so good that comes down through the parade of time.
Animation classes in all the schools I have visited or actually taught in fail to teach much of anything useful because the instructors behave like live tutorials, minus conceptuality. They teach how to use software. The rest is left for the students to learn on their own -- as it should be. But this also means that animation schools are more a place for teaching animators to take a reprieve than for students to learn anything they can't learn better when left to their own devices.
To be equipped with passion to express viewpoints and thoughts and feelings are products of individual minds and having someone show you how to animate a walk cycle won't help you to become an animator. What needs to be taught is not to make walk cycles and to think about what do I do then, if I'm not allowed to draw cycles? Now I've just given you the best lesson in animation money can't buy.
I have found that many people are wholly unaware of how easy things can be with TVPaint. When I do demonstrations at schools here, students and teachers alike are often amazed and have tons of questions afterwards. I usually animate this simple character, something like QBert from that old video game, for reasons of speed, and when students begin to see how it all comes together, with background and an example of quickly cleaning up and coloring a frame or two, they get very interested.