[_qulr]

> Many people grow up in terrible conditions and are never given a proper chance to acquire a decent education. It's not especially fair or helpful to insult them.

Hasn't it become painfully obvious by now that the upper class is full of "idiots" too? There's a kind of smug complacency that can arise from being comfortable. One is never forced to question one's assumptions.

You keep trying to pivot to poverty, but there's little reason to think that's the problem. I attended a well-regarded high school in a fairly wealthy suburb, and the ratio of "seat fillers" was about the same there as you'd see anywhere else. It just seems to be human nature, a normal distribution.

I'm not saying every education is the same. There are clearly better and worse schools. I'm saying that even when you give everyone in a group the same education, the results still tend to vary widely.

The reason I emphasize "seat fillers" is this: there are a lot of things you can teach a student by forced rote drilling. But it seems to me that critical thinking is uniquely not one of them. Isn't critical thinking the opposite of rote forced drilling? I wonder, then, how much critical thinking can even be taught to unreceptive students.