>they don't want to "get it wrong"

I, thankfully, realized this pretty early on, with help from my siblings. Collectively, we quit caring about gold stars, and started to actually learn. IMO, the main problem is that we're taught that it's bad to be wrong, and not good enough to try to outweigh the risks if you're not already fluent in the area. Success is essentially all that's valued at both an educational and social level, which entirely ignores the value of actually learning something, improving your future attempts.

tl;dr: "Win or go home" is killing our minds.