It has little to do with the "right schools." I went to the best public high school, but my Junior High was a dark pit of the first affirmative action experiment, which they called "busing." I had a sixteen year old classmate in the eighth grade. It was a fight to keep my lunch money. When busing started, in the sixth grade, I could not deal with the playground, so I would stay in an empty class, and read. The day came in junior high when I realized that I had read every book they had in the school library, and kept up with all the new arrivals. I read so much, I even had time for fiction. I read every single science fiction book that came out in the sixties, for example. The funny thing is, I really do not read that fast. I gave it an awful lot of time, and usually had two or three books going at the same time, mostly, at first, because hardcovers are hard to read on the subway. That's where i read paperbacks.
Don't blame the schools, or give them credit either. Brains come from a combination of two things. First, you need good raw material, which comes mostly from your genetic inheritance, but there are always outliers. But no matter what the capacity of the basic brain, each of us must build our own mental operating system, and exercise it, and mostly that comes from good parenting and a rich environment, the easy availability of books, and encouragement. It helps to be sort of an outcast, or a loner. If a kid seeks to fit in with his peers, he will be just as dumb as the average kids that his peers are, even if he's Einstein's identical twin. Albert Einstein could have been a great basketball player, or chess player, but fortuitous circumstance caused him to develop his imagination.
How did he ever dream up the idea that C is the universal constant, that it could all be described with math? He was not even that good at math - without a wife who was, he would never have had the effect on our world that he did. E=MC2 was her idea. So I have concluded that more important than brains or education, is luck.
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