Originally Posted by Val
My original point was that in US society, there is a myth positing that you can do anything and be a success if you just practice enough. I don't think that success is that simple, and feel that this philosophy is an extreme one that sets people up for failure while not giving them the tools they need to understand why they failed. Pushing too many people to go to college is an example of that.

"You can..." is not the same as "You might; see what happens."
I'm not in US society and don't, perhaps, have a very good understanding of how it differs from UK society. In the UK, what I think I see is some people - most of them teachers! - promulgating the falsehood you're criticising, but in reaction against a much more prominent general assumption that what matters is "potential" or "raw talent" and that nurture, practice, parenting, education and the environment in general have only minor roles to play. Maybe knowing that will make it clearer why I kick against that falsehood (too) - I agree that both are false and unhelpful.

For example, a big political issue here at the moment is the funding of universities, and the government proposes to tie a particular freedom for each university (letting the university charge more than 6Kpa fees) to that university's achieving particular targets - implied, much higher than they achieve at the moment - for the percentage of students it admits who come from disadvantaged homes and/or schools. (One article, another article.) The govt wants universities to lower entry standards to do that, arguing that there "must" be plenty of students with the "potential" to achieve at university, even if their results so far do not demonstrate it, and that universities should admit on this "potential". At my university, and I'm sure at others, we are seriously keen to admit students who will benefit from what we can offer, and we do lower entry requirements where we feel that they aren't a good reflection of how a particular student will do on our course. However, we aren't in a position to re-teach school material to students who haven't got it at school, and it's clear that our courses require some very fundamental skills which are difficult for students to pick up quickly at university if they haven't learned them in the first 17/18 years of their lives. Even if (to avoid issues irrelevant to this argument) we assumed that, say, the most disadvantaged 5% of children are, at birth, just as likely as the most advantaged 5% of children to have the potential, if they were given equal circumstances, to benefit from our courses, it doesn't follow that we're failing if it turns out that we admit more students from the latter group than from the former. What happens to the students between birth and university admission actually makes a difference to who they are and what they can do, and hence whether - at that point - they are suitable students for our courses. We are unable to do anything by fiddling our admission criteria or by running great pre-university summer courses that can come close to compensating for 18 years of disadvantage, and it is unreasonable of the government to expect us to. Yet that's where the "it's all about talent" argument which is what I mostly see in the UK leads to.

[For the benefit of anyone who knows which university I'm talking about, of course I speak here in an entirely personal capacity!]

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