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<p>Unfortunately, high-end lectures can only go so far. What this assumes is that the students have the requisite academic skills to attend to and learn from these materials, and that the schools have the facilities to share this kind of media with students. It might seem pleasantly simple to say, “Hey, these kids aren’t learning this, so we should have them watch these supplemental lectures on their free time,” but this just doesn’t pan out when you realize that many of these same students don’t have a computer at home at which to do this, or parents who are invested enough in them to take them somewhere that does. </p>
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<p>Smart and motivated are part of the puzzle, but this alone is not enough. I’ll expand on this later. </p>
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<p>Absolutely, though I don’t know if I would go as far as to say it is society as a whole that is failing. What it comes down to, I believe, is that some people wind up in circumstances that given any level of intelligence and motivation, are overwhelmingly difficult to overcome, and those who do have other factors at play that contribute to their seemingly meteoric rise out of dire circumstances.</p>
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<p>I find it kind of funny that you draw this conclusion, when as Magnetron also pointed out, the link you shared (Wikipedia, no less) presents a lot of contrasting evidence. Some important methodological issues that are inherent in many twin studies is a restriction of range, and even then there are still significant differences between twins in these studies. Sure, IQ is partially heritable, but there are undoubtedly some environmental influences on it as well.</p>
<p>This is also predicated on the belief that IQ and success (academic and otherwise) are strictly correlated, which is false. For example, when Terman performed his famous longitudinal study of extremely gifted children, many ultimately wound up being pretty unsuccessful, and we’re talking about people who are in the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile of intelligence. </p>
<p>While intelligence certainly does play a role in success, invariably there are environmental influences as well. Even if you look at some of the outliers who are used as evidence of an American meritocracy, when you examine their lives more closely the argument really falls apart. I’ll use myself as an example, just for kicks. So, I’m a first-generation college student of a high school dropout, teenage mom, and my dad works at a grocery store. I grew up poor, sometimes on welfare, had issues with family substance abuse, and didn’t have access to many enriching opportunities like Girl Scouts, ballet lessons, what have you because my family couldn’t afford them. In spite of these obstacles, I excelled throughout school, am paying for my own college education, scored very high on my GRE and am hopefully headed to graduate school (though this is yet to be seen, unfortunately). Seems like a pretty compelling case, right?</p>
<p>What you don’t see is the other factors in my life that played a role in my success. My mother may have been a high school dropout, but she is by all accounts very intelligent, she just had a really rough childhood and didn’t have the same opportunities that I had. While my parents may have their issues, they have also always been extremely supportive of my siblings and I academically, have attended our out of school functions such as plays and athletic events, taken an interest in our success, and all around provided the environment that we needed to succeed in spite of the other factors in our lives. Also, my grandmother was a manager at a publishing company, so I grew up in a house with literally hundreds of books to read (and read I did). It’s simple to look at the details of a person’s rise to success out of context, but I’d challenge to you find a single success story that had no other contributing environmental factors, and came down only to the grit, determination, and intelligence of the person in question. </p>
<p>If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because you may have recently read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. A lot of what I’ve said here is taken from/inspired by this book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has any sort of interest in this topic. I’d also be very interested to hear what people find problematic about it, because it overwhelmingly rang true to me but that may be shaded by my own experiences.</p>