Total honesty time. This topic has bothered me for years.
I went to public school and did every honors program / enrichment class / etc. that we had. Nothing that showed me how to think about learning, however. I'll get to that below. Furthermore, everything was easy enough that nobody ever found out I had severe issues focusing on the material because the pacing was so slow. I didn't think of these things as a problem at the time. I thought it was normal to daydream then learn math sort of looking in reverse, in review of what was covered "yesterday, while I was dreaming" or similar. More importantly though, given the ease of the curriculum, from an early age I thought of school as a game -- a type of intelligence test where the object was to do as well as possible with the minimum effort, using only the materials provided by the teacher, and the class lecture. This was reinforced by my peer group of course, but also parents and authority figures always telling me I was smart. With friends, the mantra, "You aren't smart if you have to work hard" was the sort of maxim we obeyed.
This all proved to be an absolutely disastrous set of notions when I finally arrived at university. I daydreamed through calculus -- I didn't have the skill of focusing. I took misinformed and patchy notes and, still playing the intelligence game, used those notes as my only source of information. I played the game until undergrad was finished. I graduated... I'd gotten by on geometric intuition and educated guesswork. I made b's and c's. Even as I failed at my own game, I wondered what was wrong with me. Why was I not smart enough?
Only at the end of my BS, after falling off the treadmill I assumed would simply spit me out in a professorship somewhere, did I realize what a mistake I'd made. The mistake, of course, in not taking every opportunity to maximize what I learned and to investigate what I was curious about -- indeed, what I loved. Only then, with no options, no academic structure before me, with every opportunity (seemingly) past, did my eyes open to see the world as it was, and not as the intelligence game. I type this now, 16 years later, in my home office; a shrine to self learning... At that time, I dug out my calculus books and started over. Soon I went to grad school for something easy -- something I could get into based on the existence of my engineering degree alone (a degree for which in and of itself, I was basically unemployable, or at least to which I did not trust myself to struggle onward and use in that way).
Meanwhile I taught myself calculus over again from page 1, and began to resurrect my prospects in the most painful way possible. Piece by piece I scrapped my education together, getting my PhD in engineering (not physics like I wanted) years late.
I've a very wide education now, but I am always wondering what could have been, and now I have a toddler, almost 2 years old. One thing about the above I know: I just want to make sure he never goes through such a process with wool over his eyes. I want him to know from the start how to direct his curiosity into learning what he wants, at his own pace.