COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN
Sorry, I think you are just wrong, Oliver James, about not
being able to “blame the genes.”
Nurture over nature is a common contemporary prejudice, but
it does not stand up to examination.
I certainly support nurturing, but we should be aware of the
limits always.
In any field from sports to playing an instrument, we know
that native talent always wins the day no matter how much nurturing goes on.
You cannot make someone with the talent to be an acceptable
pop piano player into a Rubenstein. It just cannot be done.
And each year in America, literally millions of kids play
Little League Baseball, many of them, often joined by their parents, dreaming
of making it into the “big leagues,” but there are only something on the order
of 600 people at any time who get to do so.
Those are pretty terrible odds that completely favor natural
talent. If you bet against them, working as hard as possible, you are sure to
lose.
And so it is with all fields of effort in academics from
languages to maths.
The trouble with emphasizing nurture so much is all the
terrible pressures it puts on teachers and coaches from all the parents who
aren't happy with what their child has proved capable of.
It is also unfair to children who are bound to be
disappointed by false promises.
And, in the end, the religion of nurture - for that is just
what it is, religion, not science - just leads society and institutions off
onto false paths
_______________________________
Response to another
reader:
But, oh, how wrong you are.
There are countless cases of people with good minds
surviving and thriving bad homes, bad institutions, wars, catastrophes, etc.
Really terrible homes tend to point to lack of mental talent
in the parents in the first place.
Not always, but I think often enough to form a pretty good
working assumption.
