Being able to find ONE kid from a poor background who eventually managed to do well and secure a scholarship later on in life doesn't prove or disprove anything. In any case, if you actually come across one, it's probably the exception rather than the norm.
I know of a kid who lost his mother at one, thereafter his father gave the boy away to his sister as he couldn't cope with the task of raising his child alone. After that, the kid stayed with his aunt and cousins who saw him as an outsider and bullied him constantly. His father still visited him occassionally but nevertheless, the kid grew up lonely.
The kid grew up rebellious and was your typical problem child from primary school all the way to lower secondary school. Then when he was 14, his father passed away too. That served as a wake up call, and he started to take life more seriously... from Sec three onwards, he studied hard... graduated in the top 10% of his cohort, made it to a top JC and later on to a local university. Eventually he graduated with a Pharmacy degree and now works as a pharmacist.
Every now and then... people would comment that he's acutally quite a smart person, why didn't he study medicine in
NUS? He definitely have the makings of a good doctor...
Because he didn't do well in his early years in secondary school, he didn't qualify for triple science combi in JC and later on medicine in
NUS. He didn't even bother to try applying for medicine because of the admission criteria. The other thing is, medicine is demanding course both in the academic sense and financially as well. How is he going to cope? It's a strain enough having to work part time while studying, working part time while doing medicine? One wonders, if he had that extra determination, would things have turned out differently? Maybe. The other scenario would be having our boy grow up in an "elite" family with all the support... things would definitely be different.