Comment by Barrin92

You don't need to be able to run 100m in less than 10 seconds. But almost everyone probably could run a marathon in three and a half hours. How many people do you think have actualized their physical potential, or how far is the average person removed from it?

If someone's smart enough to get into a psychology class they are smart enough to be thought basic undergrad math. It wasn't your teaching failure necessarily, but it was someone's teaching failure at some point.

Not everyone can play Rachmaninov like Lugansky or do math like Terence Tao, but there is absolutely no doubt that almost all people are magnitudes away from their latent potential in almost all domains. I'm fairly certain you could teach any average person how to play Rachmaninov decently. You could bring any person to a reasonably high mathematical level. You can get any person to lift a few hundred pounds.

Most people today read at a 7th grade level, can't do basic math, and are out of air after 3 flights of stairs. "Everyone can do everything" is maybe not literally right but directionally right given how utterly far removed we are from developing practically anyone's potential.