Actually, we feel lazy when we are stuck with something. I remember a time when I was a child, I have so much energy, I can run, jump, walk and it seemed that it was unlimited sources. I went to school and then I've realized that my mind started to watch television, or find some ways on how to avoid studying. But there were subjects that I liked so much, I came home, started to do some stuff and then learned it. And the teacher was really strict, but I love them. I did my job done, and now I think about it with gratitude and it is awesome.
And if we talk about laziness, we need to say about the lack of energy from a lot of teachers. It is a truth that children feel it. How do we can change that? Just simple, simplify learning and gives techniques that helped to feel confident in studying and give time for learning, as indeed it is not easy to focus on, you need this energy.
Show how to learn, but not talk about it. As indeed human beings are awesome creatures, they can be good at a lot of things, we only need to realize that everything takes time. That's why you cannot be good at everything, but you can be good at something.
This industry exists substantially as a function of the laziness of college professors and academic program curricula developers. There's almost no educational benefit to most students by virtue of having to write research papers and essays, especially in courses totally outside of their academic majors. It's not that writing isn't an important skill for many professions, because it is. So is mathematics; but we don't require liberal arts students to do math problems in most of their liberal arts course throughout all four years of their college studies. College isn't mandatory in the first place, so people who choose to attend college should have the complete autonomy to decide for themselves what skills they choose to develop. Certain professions and their corresponding courses of study obviously require much more writing by their very nature: Journalism and English Studies and Political Science should emphasize writing, as should Education, Psychology, and Sociology, to a lesser extent, and largely depending on what students actually intend on doing with those degrees. Conversely, Math and Computer Science majors (especially) and students majoring in most other fields shouldn't have to do as much writing in college.
Assigning "research" projects to undergraduate students, especially in courses outside of their majors doesn't promote learning, or research skills, or, for the most part, even writing skills. The typical undergraduate views it as a miserable chore, leaves it to the last minute, and then does little more than string together a bunch of block quotes and/or heavily paraphrased (and almost always incorrectly or insufficiently-cited) material as much as necessary to satisfy the assigned word count. In many cases, they simply fill up pages with paraphrased passages loosely strung together and with virtually no independent thought whatsoever in between all of those cited passages. Students detest those assignments and get very little out of them. The fact that essay topics are typically open to the choice of students means that there's very little educational value to the chore and negligible substantive educational value to the subject matter of any particular project.
Everybody needs to learn how to communicate somewhat effectively in writing, but those skills can be taught much more directly and effectively without the connection to specific elective courses. It's just a lazy way of assigning work capable of being graded. It would make a lot more sense to eliminate the writing requirement in most courses and either require students to take more (pure) writing courses that focus on routine business (and general written) communication skills or to require those types of courses only for students whose professors have identified them, specifically, as needing some remedial writing work, either from their written exams or from annual writing tests given strictly for the purpose of identifying students who are not yet capable of expressing themselves in writing well enough to pursue their career goals (which should vary depending on their chosen major course of study).
Operation Varsity Blues tends to lend credence to the assumptions of the OP. Based on the children involved, they are privileged, spoiled, lazy kids who were never forced to attend school if they don't want to. Daddy and Mommy can get them that grade they need so that people will think they are educated. They'll just sign a check. Although, not all students are like that. Some just really need a break from the stressful academic world at certain times during the semester. That's when they decide to hire a writer to create a pocket of "me time" for themselves. They aren't always spoiled, they aren't always rich, they aren't always over-privileged. I think it's about 50/50 in this case.
