[bmj]

But if a child is never exposed to work (that is, focusing on things that don't necessarily interest them rather than simply floating between things they find fun), he may not be equipped to make the proper decisions later in life.

Don't misinterpret what I'm saying--I'm not suggesting that children are simply forced to learn things, especially without any sort of context. I am suggesting that sometimes children needed to be nudged to get over the "I don't want to think hard about this" hump. We've seen this in our own kids. Our older son didn't particular like to put forth the effort to read himself, but we asked him to do it just a bit each day, and quickly he realized this opened up a whole world of stuff that he could do on his own.