People talk about intelligence a lot, but the sheer difference in interest is just as big, if not a bigger factor.

In an average class, you get most kids - who are mostly content to be there. And then you get the outliers. There's that one kid who appears to be suffering something just short of physical pain whenever he's in class learning something. Then there's the kid who has already read all his textbooks in the first week, for fun, and even retained a lot of it, because he was engaged with the material.

They may have the same exact intelligence, but the outcomes could not be more different.

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john-h-k 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I would be willing to bet intelligence is a much larger deciding factor in grades than interest is. Most people I know who got top grades had barely any interest in many of the subjects

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Lu2025 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Interest and motivation comes largely from success. You try something, it works, it feels good so you continue doing that. The school's role is to enable this "easy success" early on so kids will continue.

	▲	somenameforme 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I find this point of view somewhat difficult to support. It was the whole motivation behind the cultural shift towards 'everybody's a winner' - participation trophies, expanding honor roll with 'merit roll', character awards, personal achievement awards, and so on. But far from driving excellence across the rather vast number of fields where it was trialed, it only seems to correlate with the period of overall decline in educational performance. And from a practical point of view, let's consider this. The mindset one is indulging with this is that it's okay to quit if something is hard. But how does indulging that mindset, change it? What happens when the easy successes end and things not only get hard, but very hard? Are you not simply creating false expectations?