Is success in life determined by academic excellence?

Question

Im entering for a debate competition, and one of the motions is This House Believes that Success in Life is Determined by Academic Excellence. It would be helpful if you guys could give your opinions both for the motion and against the motion. And any stats that you might have :)

Answer 1

nooooooooo

Answer 2

sucess is what a person invisions  to be a happy life but 99.9% of the time education  is required to achieve that  sucess. STAY  IN SCHOOL DRUGS ARENT COOL!

Answer 3

I think it makes it easier to achieve success if you have an excellent education but it's not always a necessity...many self-millionaires achieved their success from hard work and ingenuity

Answer 4

Position - AGAINST the motion:

"The learning and internalization of academic facts learned in an educational environment is merely a small subset of skills that a person need to be, for example, financially successful ; it is not enough to merely know how to handle accounting or handle their tax affairs, but skills that cannot be taught in a class room like negotiation skills in business are also essential."

Answer 5

Drimaste,

Is success in life determined by academic excellence?

In order for us to debate this, we would have to define what "success" means. It is important to clarify or state the meaning of the word because you don't want it to be left at the interpretation of others.

According to the Merriam- Webster dictionary "success" means: 2 a: to turn out well b: to attain a desired object or end <students who succeed in college>

Having clarified the meaning of the word "success", we can now move on to the next word in your question “determined”.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary “determine” means: 2 a: to fix the form, position, or character of beforehand: ORDAIN <two points determine a straight line> b: to bring about as a result: REGULATE <demand determines the price>

The next step is the implications made by these two words:

1) Is attaining a desired object or end regulated by academic excellence? In other words, this says that if we attained academic excellence, then we will be successful in life.

It’s been the belief that if you are responsible in school and work hard, you show that you are someone responsible. Thus people who are responsible, attain their desired goals.

But what happens when no matter what you do you are not able to change the course of your life? Or what happens when your academic excellence isn’t available to you? May be your parents don’t have the means to provide you with the basic needs and you need to work and can’t make it to school or be the best student you could be. Does this mean your life will be doomed to be unsuccessful?

Who do we consider to be successful people?

Don’t we consider actors/actresses/singers/ athletes/ presidents/CEO’s people who have a successful life? Is their success correlated to their academic scores? We’ve read in the news that our current president George W. Bush was a C student. We’ve also read how many “successful” actors/actresses/singers/athletes had to drop out of school in pursue of their careers.

If success in life were to be determined by academic excellence, does that mean that geeks and nerds are the most successful people out there? They should be the happiest people on earth and the ones most admired- right?

If you were not satisfied with your accomplishments, what would be the purpose of academic excellence?  

What does it mean to be successful in life if you aren’t happy? What does it mean to be successful if after you’ve attained every one of your objectives/goals you don’t feel satisfied? What does it mean to be successful in life if the people you love hate you? What does it mean to be successful in life if you keep making poor judgments? What does it mean to be successful if what you studied in school is a career you hate, and the career you love you’re not even average?

I hope this is a successful attempt from my part :-)

Answer 6

Argue that success in life is defined by the person who is determining how successful the person is, not  by one silly aspect. There is more to life than academics. Throw that in their face.