Perhaps I could have used a more "politically correct" term... whatever. I think you're right though, simply viewing the way others live may not actualize the idea in their minds. What really motivated me to do well in high school/college was that I worked a retail job in high school and got to experience shitty work for little pay. Great incentive to NOT get stuck doing that the rest of my life.
I don't think enough high school kids really experience middle class (or below) labor. During high school I stocked shelves at the local grocery store for minimum wage, then the summer after high school I worked in a plastic injection factory assembling Honda Accord parts as they came right out of the machine (so hot), and then during college I worked in a nasty, oily machine shop. Finishing college and getting an office job making 4x as much is so rewarding I can't even describe it.
"You're telling me that I can just sit here all day and you pay me this much for what comes out my head?"
Some days this is the thing that amazes me most at work. Half the time i'm literally making stuff up as I go yet somehow to them it's worth a ton of money.
What people pay professionals for is the background knowledge, well developed intuition, and perspective that allows the random crap you make up as they go along to be viable, reasonable ideas that actually work in the real world. That kind of perspective isn't built cheaply or overnight, and it's one reason that a well educated professional opinion is worth more than someone else's less informed opinion.
It's become fashionable in this day and age to pretend that all opinions are created equal. But they aren't. A person who has taken the trouble to accumulate a great deal of knowledge in a specific area (including a basic familiarity with things that have been proven NOT to work) can pull an idea out of his or her ass and have it be better than the well considered but uninformed opinion of someone who has not bothered to inform himself or herself of the facts.
Education alone cannot make an idiot or a jerk into something besides an idiot or a jerk, and some people manage to attain more than others given the same level of academic preparation due to innate differences in creativity, opportunity, or work ethic. However
in the select domain to which the education applies the person who has a background and working knowledge of a problem is better prepared to deal with it competently than one who does not.
A common misconception among people with lots of "book-larnin" is that education is universally transferable, and that the skills and insight one can gain in university is necessarily helpful or practical when trying to, say, repair a car or teach children how to play the piano. The extreme contempt displayed by the urban educated elite during and after the last US federal election is an illustration of the relationship between education and knowledge: one can study one subject for decades and yet be completely ignorant of the conditions and facts that apply in another region or economic circumstance.