My sense is that the education system struggles with the transition between learning-to-read and reading-to-learn.

Somewhat off-topic: high schools anywhere don't seem to explicitly teach the only essential skill a college student must need: learning to learn:

How do I figure out what I need to know for a given class, how do I figure out what I do not know, and how do I go about learning it efficiently?

is not a question students learn to ask or answer. Everyone who completes a post-secondary education tends to come up with some sort of implicit heuristics that get them through, few do it consciously.