A big part of the increasing workload to play ratio in elementary school is for learning to do some hard work. If you coast and/or give up easily, there will be a tall wall waiting for you at university level if not earlier. It won’t be hard to scale if you’ve learned to put in the effort, but it will be too late to start practicing that then.

Same goes for figuring out how to make your brain retain information (association building). At some point rote memorization isn’t going to cut it anymore.

These things need to be built up along with the basic knowledge. And yes, schools and teachers all around the world are often failing the students in that. There’s no simple blame or simple cure. Education is a huge task.