I can't help but notice, especially this season, that most of the contestants come from a privileged background. With big houses and parents that can afford not to work to homeschool or whatever that stupid thing the paleo parents did. So I guess screw kids from a less lower socioeconomic class. Even though as I have said earlier this completion is not as much logic or knowledge but memorizing items.
shareFor the record... You don't have to be rich to homeschool. That said, I looked at the application when they had it online after season 1, and you basically have to have money to even qualify because they want to know all the different activities and whatnot your kid is involved in. If you can't afford that kind of stuff, or if your kid is bright but not in a lot of things, you never even could have filled out the application. Graham never would have qualified for Season 2 I think, based on that alone.
shareI came from a household where my parents had to work to survive. That was what my dad even said on my 16th birthday. Happy birthday get a job. So we may have different ideas of rich. If you come from a family that doesn't need both parents to work then you have a better socioeconomic advantage.
shareWow, i didn't know they had to have extra curricular activities to qualify. It would be interesting to know what each child submitted on their application because i can only recall about five who would qualify from this group: Adrian, Drake (which clearly was not even close in the intelligence arena), Vivek, Iris and Claire.
shareIsn't this what you would expect? People tend to take after their parents, so if you go looking for very, very smart children, you are likely to find children who tend to have very smart parents. And if you find a lot of very smart parents, you are probably going to find that a lot of them are doctors or lawyers or suchlike. Not all of the parents will be, of course, but a lot of them will be.
In a perfectly meritocratic society, social position would be determined entirely by your native ability, which would be determined entirely by your DNA, and the participants of this competition would all come from some of the richest families in the country.