Family background is the main influence on academic achievement

Hi! Let's begin. Firstly, the burden structure here is for my opponent to show that Family Influence is as a matter of fact the biggest influence. If my opponent has no offense, you default Con because the burden doesn't require I propose a counter-resolution. Onto the substance! I establish that there's no way to quantify culpability in decision making. For example, it's impossible to say that me getting into Harvard was 25% family influence, 25% natural talent, 15% time management skill, 30% luck, 5% hard work. Unless my opponent provides a way to quantify it, we're going to have to presume Con here because a 'main' influence implies that it's the biggest. Unfortunately, these things aren't quantifiable. Right of the bat, you ought to vote Con here. Onto the substance - this is going to be mainly a nature vs. nurture debate. I'm advocating that nature is more important. Family influence is all nurture, how the child is raised, so if I show nature is more important than nurture, I win. And "Nature prevails enormously over nurture when the differences of nurture do not exceed what is commonly to be found among persons " " said geneticist Francis Galton. So much information is encoded within our genes, it's hard to say that family background and how we are raised are a bigger impact than genes. And to address the second argument, about socioeconomic status, I contend that the causation is the other way around. Intelligence determines socioeconomic status, not the opposite, what my opponent proposes. Intelligence & socioeconomic status Herrstein and Murray (1994) argue that low intelligence causes low socioeconomic status, rather than the other way around. So, according to these authors, while SES is correlated with IQ, it should be considered a consequence rather than a cause. However, adoption studies seem to indicate that SES has a strong, causal effect on intelligence, e.g.: "Well-controlled adoption studies done in France have found that transferring an infant from a family having low socioeconomic status (SES) to a home where parents have high SES improves childhood IQ scores by 12 to 16 points or about one standard deviation, which is considered a large effect size in psychological research." Wahlsten (1997, p. 76). Several recent US studies have demonstrated improvements in children's IQ's by improving the lives of infants in disadvantaged circumstances. These studies employed random assignment of children and families to treatment and control conditions. These studies selected families with: � low parental IQ � low parental education � minimal financial resources Experimental group received: enriched, educational day care outside the home every weekday from 3 months to start of schooling Control group received: nutritional supplements and pediatric medical care or crisis intervention but no educational day care Even though the children returned to their home environment every day and spent holidays and weekends with their families (mostly unemployed, single mothers) in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods, there were large gains in IQ; almost as much as in the French studies previously mentioned. Furthermore, the mean IQ of the enriched groups appeared to be quite typical of healthy American children. These children continued to show higher IQ scores than controls at age 12 (Wahlsten, 1997). Of course, in these American studies, SES and education were being manipulated. There is of course a strong correlation between SES and education in both directions. So, there's two layers to the debate: 1) presume con because we can't quantify the influences in decision 2) There's no offense on the Pro side 3) Genes are more important than family Thus, I urge a Con vote here.