How Smart Are You? It Depends on What People Expect
Three people come to mind who struggled in school and still built real lives. One of them wrestled with learning as a kid, then enrolled in a two year program to become a certified aircraft mechanic. He finished it, and over the course of his career he kept learning to service all sorts of complicated planes as newer ones came along. Another man got labeled "dumb" in his school years, yet he made a steady living and raised a family like anyone else. And there was a girl whose early schooling was full of learning trouble; she later went to college, pulled an A in organic chemistry, and got into a master's program. Nobody graded those outcomes by accident. Their abilities had simply been sold short.
A study makes the point better than I can. In one school, teachers were handed IQ results for different classes within the same grade. The numbers were fake, and the classes were no smarter than any other. But by the end of the year, the students whose teachers had been told to expect more had actually gained more than they'd had at the start. I know the feeling from the other side. Somebody once informed me I would never do better than a B in college. I didn't cooperate with that prediction. I never scored below a B. You need to believe in yourself, or at least have one person who believes in you and says so out loud.
So how smart are you if school didn't go well, or if you never got much of an education? There's a long list of people who did "poorly" as children and later made discoveries the world remembers. Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, and Abraham Lincoln turn up in those stories. A lot of the time the real limit is self-imposed. People take someone else's low opinion of them as fact, swallow it, and settle into the idea that they're meant to fail. What you believe about yourself, and what the people raising you believed, shapes a surprising amount of what you end up doing.
This holds even for people with developmental disabilities, and it held especially in years past. Parents used to be told, flatly, to put such a child in an institution and move on, because nothing could be done. I won't pretend every case is a matter of expectations. Some people are born with severe deficiencies that can't be fixed and that come with a short life expectancy. There are people who will never feed themselves or communicate at all, who need full care every hour of every day. I have sat with them. But I have also counseled parents who badly underestimated their developmentally disabled child, and who put up with behavior that the child was in fact able to control.
When the people around you aim low on your behalf, that aim becomes a question worth refusing. You might be able to do far more than any of them guessed, if you decide to find out.