| | Ross,
I also apologize for insinuating that you had no/little teaching experience. However, I'm not familiar with Montessori schools and how they recruit students. One of the "lovely" things about teaching in the public school system is that you get *all* kinds of students - the schools must accommodate students with all kinds of backgrounds and abilities.
You wrote:
"I didn't say that nurture was the only factor, I said it was a strong factor, and I can assure you that of the hundreds of students that passed through my hands, those that had the most difficulty learning were those who came from difficult environments. Many of them still write to me and let me know how they're doing.
My views come from personal experience and until someone equally qualified can show me that environment is not the decisive factor in a person's ability to think and learn coherently, I'll take conjecture and supposition under advisement."
I think that breaking down the whole issue to my satisfaction would take me forever. However, there are few things of note here:
1) Given the complexity of the subject matter (educational achievement and mental ability), there is rarely a *decisive* factor in a person's ability to think and learn coherently, and even claiming this or that is a decisive factor will be a result of analyzing groups of individuals. A fairly detailed comparison and contrast will simply reveal that the variance in observed achievement/ability will be related to this or that factor more strongly.
For example, in this paradigm, it makes no sense to say that Ayn Rand was a good novelist because she read Aristotle or because she was a great thinker etc. However, given a sample of individuals we want to look at, we could say that what differentiates Ayn Rand (and individuals like her who were good novelists) from another set might be that Ayn Rand and those like her read Aristotle, were good thinkers etc. At best, we might be arguing that the fountain of many of Ayn Rand's thoughts might be her study of Aristotle - but when that is applied to something like "the environment", we need to be clear what part of "the environment" we are referring to.
2) It is possible for environment to be relatively decisive in some contexts and for nature to be relatively decisive in other contexts. If you want to understand the paradigm within which these experiments about the relative effect or nurture/nature are analyzed, you can read about behavioral/quantitative genetics and the pioneering work of Sir Ronald Fisher.
Therefore, it is just as important that you specify the population sample to which you are applying your claims about nurture trumping nature as it is that you specify what aspects of nurture you think are decisive.
3) There is a real distinction between mental ability and educational achievement. Both are often correlated, but not perfectly so.
Cheers,
Laj.
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