You're also assuming that Shakespeare had only one teacher. His environment was simply set up in a way to tap his inherent aptitude. The notion that having inherent aptitude implies that it will manifest itself to the world regardless of the quality of one's environment is at best toxic and at worse insulting.

To quote Stephen Jay: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".

For example, I grew up in a broken family, living with a stepmother who did her best to trip me until my father gets convinced that I should live with my mother instead. As a result, when my father was away, I received no help in my homework. Her kids did. In this scenario, the "nature over nurture" debater will argue that if I was meant to be good in math then I would be able to push through on my own without external assistance when needed. But when I didn't, my lack of understanding snowballed, my confidence got hit and I ended up being a gang member who avoids school to waste time in the arcade, smoke and pinball.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that what I'm saying is that I would have been the next Einstein or that I'm ultra-talented and I blame my stepmother for not having a math phd. But maybe I would have been good enough not to repeat the same school year twice. Maybe having access to someone explaining to me how important mathematics are to programming would stimulate my interest more and would motivate me to try and get good at them instead of dodging my responsibilities.

I dedicate my life in 2 things: Combat ageism and expose to programming as many people as possible. They don't have to want to become developers but, maybe they'll find it interesting enough to change their life or their workflows. Because I am not just a person, I'm also part of someone else's environment.

It can be both: that the teacher helped a _gifted_ boy grow into the author we know now, and the boy wouldn't have become the author we know now without them.

Just because their other pupils didn't turn out to be legendary doesn't invalidate the teacher's contribution, which is to say, doesn't mean the joke was in good taste.

> if it were due to the teacher, there would have been hundreds of Shakespeares from all the pupils that teacher taught throughout their career.

They would not. Because many of those kids would move on to do something different. And also because success is more then just ability. Economy can not have hundreds of famous play writers, there are not enough theaters.