The problem with American youth is not that they work only 4 hours a day, but they want results equivalent to that of someone who is working 14 hours a day. Their expectation is that government somehow should come up with policies to create jobs.
Reflecting on American history it appears that the country was built by men and women with their own ambitions and strength. Instead of appreciating that the youth is getting into a some kind of entitlement thinking.
"as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding"
Students don't have to do that anywhere. And they don't do that anywhere. I have lived in east Asia (and my three older children all have) and I challenge your assumption that pupils there study for fourteen hours a day (they most certainly do not) or that everything about schools there is a "pressure cooker environment." There are trade-offs involved in living anywhere, rather than living somewhere else, but you really owe it to yourself to find out more about how effective primary teaching is done before concluding that it shouldn't be tried in the United States. As they say in Chinese-speaking countries, "百聞不如一見" (hearing about something a hundred times isn't worth seeing it once). I offer for your reading pleasure a reading suggestion, full of food for thought, namely Liping Ma's book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States.[1] Reviews of this book appear below the book link.
Anyway, we can get other reality checks on this issue by seeing what people who have studied the United States school curriculum say about secondary schools here, for example "What’s Holding Back American Teenagers? Our high schools are a disaster."[2] The last federal sample survey on the issue resulted in news reports such as, "School is too easy, students report,"[3] suggesting that a lot of learners here don't appreciate dumbed-down school lessons that waste their time without providing a return in new knowledge and skills.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall1999/amed1.pdf
http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2695436?uid=2&uid=4&si...
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/02/high_sc...
[3] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2012-07-...