Children don't do anything beside simple and pleasing activities unless forced to. Studying is hard, not immediately rewarding and boring. No child likes to study, some are just more pliable.
> Kids are naturally curious
This curiosity extends to simple facts (like "who's the best soccer player: Messi or Ronaldo?") it doesn't help with important subjects that need studying (like, how do you prove Pythagoras' theorem).
> Introduce them to study and scholarship as a means of figuring these things out, so that it becomes natural to them.
Children simply don't "work" like that. If you let children "figure things out", they'll "figure out" if Messi or Ronaldo are the best soccer player, and they will never even ask why is the sum of squares of the catheti equals the square of hypotenuse. Not only will they never ask that, they'll never figure out there are right triangles. Some discoveries in human knowledge took us many generations to make and some are trivial and easily discoverable. The former is difficult for people to learn. It requires effort that doesn't result in instant gratification. It's boring because often you will have to read the same thing many times over. It's frustrating because even after having read the same thing you still might not understand it. You have to be a masochist to like doing that. Generally, people who do it, don't do it because they like it. They like the side effects (eg. you may like to be paid a professor's salary, and so you'd grind the subject you want to be a professor in).
So, it never becomes "natural" to anyone, especially not to the children outside of the very few very simple things one might learn in this way. Left to their own devices, maybe half of all the children would love to become YouTube influencers who make their living by streaming the video games they play. They'd never even consider becoming an accountant or an engineer. They wouldn't even know accountants or engineers exist.