[Pearls Before Swine]

The ones who had enough wit to eventually “mainstream” were light years ahead of their mainstream classmates in reading and calculation and wife got some flak for that.

That is stunning, and both easy (given the times) and hard (awww... c'mon, too ridiculous to be true) to believe at the same time.

[arthurus]

You can teach many stupid children to read with phonics and they will outshine their looksay higher IQ (except homeschooler) contemporaries. They may never get beyond what used to be a 6th grade reading level but far too many of their smarter classmates never make it to that level. Same with rote memorization of arithmetic facts. You can teach a dummy to add and subtract and even to multiply and divide without a calculator if you give him a databank to draw on- that's the rote memorization- along with rudimentary calculation skills.