As a college student, I second shend's statement that high schoolers are lazy.
Do you think most high schoolers are more lazy than most college students? If so, is this because people actually develop more of a work ethic by college, or because lazy people never even make it that far?
I think most people are probably lazy, if by "lazy" we mean reluctant to consider ideas outside their comfort zone or seek knowledge for its own sake. But I haven't seen any reason to believe that laziness is more prevalent in high school than in the general population.
It probably is more prevalent in high school than college, just because the college application process, especially to selective schools, strongly selects against laziness.
I don't have nearly enough evidence to have high confidence in this conclusion, but I think high schoolers are intellectually lazier simply because of the selection effect of the college application process. I have noticed (warning: anecdotal evidence!) that college students (myself included) tend to procrastinate a lot more, but that may only be because they have increased freedom to do so.
But I haven't seen any reason to believe that laziness is more prevalent in high school than in the general population.
And you might be right--I don't think it's a...
In school we learn wonderful things like how to find integrals, solve equations, and how to calculate valence electrons of elements based on their atomic numbers. Because, obviously, they will be very important in our futures -- especially if we become artists, musicians, writers, actors, and business people.
We learn so much in school. Yet, when most people look at paintings they don’t truly understand them. When most people listen to music, they don’t really know what they’re hearing. Most people would fail simple music theory tests, even though many have listened to music most days of the week since they were babies!
Similarly, if you have working eyes, you should ask “Why do shadows look like they do? What color is snow, really? Can I predict the colors of different colored materials at different times of the day? If not, why? I have been seeing them for years, haven’t I?”
I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. But, they are relatively advanced topics. People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most?
Why don’t we learn how to understand our senses?
Learning about sight, sounds, thoughts, etc. should fit in somewhere in the first year of high school. Everyone needs to learn the physics of art and color (e.g. this and this), music theory, rationality, and logic.
For example, why should people start learning (or pretending to learn) philosophy, the art of thinking, in college? Should we be able to make life-changing decisions without even knowing how to spot errors in our thinking?
As a science researcher, I know first hand how hard it is to find a good balance between being well versed in worldly topics and being focused on a field in order to excel in it. But, both of these areas of study should not be called the true basics, in my opinion.
As president of my school's philosophy club, I took a different approach to teaching the basics of philosophy and thinking than traditional classes do. Instead of asking students to discuss the lives and ideas of famous Greek philosophers, I asked them to analyze their own lives and make their own philosophies. As expected, they were terrible at it at first. But, by the end of the year people began to actually think about the world around them.
So, my point is that we should -- in life and in school -- emphasize actual everyday thinking more.
The biggest challenge is that it takes so long!