Except they aren't making the best decisions most of the time, and by the time the kid can study what they want easily on their own (think things like money for buying materials), they're stuffed with bullshit busywork from their normal classes that are intellectually boring and take forever to do, until they get to college (hopefully).

Or at least that's what it was like for me. One of the things I loved to do was to code, and well, that sort of went out the window for the two years I was in high school because I'd be dead tired and in need of sleep every single night after the requisite extracurriculars and homework. My parents wouldn't let me drive to school in the morning because I'd get only a couple of hours of sleep a night sometimes and they didn't want me to fall asleep behind the wheel.

Even on weekends I didn't have time because I had to study for the classes I hated and do lame group projects where at least one member didn't do their fair share of work.

I similarly found pre-university studies rather boring, rarely did the 'busywork' and skirted "on intuition" across most of it. Got me into a fancy named university, but only then to realise my ignorance of what 'work' was. I'm just about half-way through college, and maybe now I begin to appreciate 'work' and unlearn the habits from before. It's surprisingly difficult.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that HS trains (American) kids to work so well. Society runs on people doing (generally) repetitive work consistently. My early rejection of the system meant I got left out in the cold in terms of knowing how to do that. I did get a lot of 'soft' (i.e. cannot learn from books) computer/cs/systems knowledge out of what I did spent my HS years doing, though.

Wow, silencio, I had to check the comment header to make sure this wasn't one of those comments I write in the middle of the night and forget about :). I think you might be my long lost twin.

sweet! I've come across a loot of people who thought the same too..