The explanation you were taught at school is wrong
The story about air travelling further over the curved top of the wing is tidy, memorable and does not survive contact with the evidence.
The familiar version goes like this. The top of the wing is curved, so air going over the top has further to travel than air going underneath. To arrive at the back at the same moment, the upper air must go faster. Faster air has lower pressure. Lower pressure above than below means the wing is pulled up. It is a satisfying chain of reasoning, and generations have repeated it. Unfortunately the second step is simply invented. There is no rule of nature that requires two parcels of air separated at the front of a wing to be reunited at the back. They are not partners. They have no appointment.
When the flow over a wing is measured, the air passing over the upper surface arrives at the trailing edge well before the air underneath, not at the same instant. It moves much faster than the difference in path length would ever require. The tidy explanation does not merely lack a mechanism, it gets the numbers wrong in the wrong direction. Worse, it predicts that a wing with a flat, symmetrical section could not lift at all, and that a wing flown inverted would push its aircraft firmly towards the ground. Both of those things are contradicted by ordinary aerobatic flying, which happens somewhere in the world every day of the week.
None of this means pressure is irrelevant. Pressure is exactly how the air conveys its push to the wing, and the pressure over the upper surface really is lower. The point is that the lower pressure and the downward turning of the air are not rival explanations. They are the same event described from two sides. Air curving downward behind a wing must be being pulled by something, and what pulls it is a region of reduced pressure above. Fix the picture at the level of what the air is doing, and the pressure map stops being a mysterious coincidence and becomes an obvious consequence.