Well, yes, as soon as you choose a school you are implicitly communicating expectations, aren’t you? But what parent selects a school that doesn’t have good academic outcomes - you don’t chose a school on the basis it’s results are a bit average, do you? Schools are ‘education factories’ so it’s counterintuitive to expect them to sell themselves on anything less than their academic results. Naturally, balanced parents would weight his against sports/extra curricular activities, school ethos etc.
In fact we chose a child centred, arts-orientated, non-selective private school precisely because we think children should find their own path and that this may involve art college, drama school, music school or and not just academic degrees from Russell Groups unis. However it IS a private school (chosen because both our DCs are ASD/ADHD and it is 4miles from us). We’re just boring middle class professionals, the first in our families to go to university but the cohort included the daughters of Oscar winning film directors, several famous emmy/bafta/oscar nominees, along with - I found out recently after my son’s recent Prom after-party - several tech and gaming billionaires.
Every one of those parents also believe in child centred education, creative approaches to learning and encouraged their kids to take their own path… but if you have successful parents in whatever walk of life, the subtext is they value drive and success. It’s natural that young people in this environment internalise this, rather than receive the message that ‘we want you to be happy so let’s talk about what that looks like for you’. I also acknowledge that as parents we clearly failed to underscore that message.
I very much suspect that OP and her son are in a similar position - that she has simply wanted what was best for her son but the message got twisted. A relationship like this can be rebuilt though, which is what we’ve spent the last couple of years doing with our child.
It’s taken several years, lots of college/arts college open days and hundreds of hours of conversations to convince her that we’d be 1000% supportive of doing an animation degree (which almost operates like an apprentice degree as far as I can see). We’ve even looked at apprentice schemes, but those still seem to require a degree! Explaining that you’d be as proud to see their name in the credits of a Cartoon Network/Pixar reel as you would be to see their sibling graduate from med school but - even when you absolutely genuinely mean it - can fall on deaf ears as you are swimming against the tide of all the other stuff.
If I were OP, I’d park the hurt at her son not having been honest and direct about it all and accept that along the way, the school and family culture lead to a misunderstanding that they now have the chance to clear up. He’s done amazingly well and has opened up now. It’s a great opportunity to renegotiate their relationship and to communicate that his happiness is paramount and that her love for him is not contingent on his success.