It's incredibly sad to see kids fail in school who then go on to under-perform in later life. It's a tragedy for the child/adult who can't manage to succeed at anything, and it's a tragedy of loss for his/her society. The good this person would have contributed to other people goes un-done, and the fulfillment it would have given him/her never happens.
Conventional wisdom since about 1994 has said that children succeed at school as a direct result of the cognitive training they've had. Some researchers narrowed it down to the number of words a child has heard by age three: "children raised by professional parents had heard thirty million words spoken to them; the children with parents on welfare had heard just ten million."
Out of this philosophy came the industry of brain-building learning aids for children 0-3 so that concerned parents can offer more books, more flash cards, more educational videos to their young before pre-school.
But new research seems to indicate that different factors help children succeed, not only in school but in every way. This may mean that more at-risk kids can be helped to change their lives.
From How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough, published 2012
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