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Viliam_Bur comments on Don't rely on the system to guarantee you life satisfaction - Less Wrong
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Sometimes it's not even about the challenge, but about an environment actually punishing you for doing a smart thing. (Or for doing a thing that seems smart on your level, such as publicly correcting your teacher's mistake. Yeah, it's obvious to us why this is probably a bad idea, but not to a 10-years old child. The child does it, receives some kind of punishment, and most likely learns the wrong lesson that it is wrong to analyze too much what higher-status people are telling you.)
If the lack of challenge were the only problem, we could fix it rather easily by adding more difficult alternatives within the system. For example if a child is bored during the math lessons, you could just give them an option to take the final exam at the beginning or in the middle of the year, and if they pass, they don't have to attend the lessons (they might have to stay at school, but be able to read something, debate with other similar students, or do some private project on the computer).
I just got a new appreciation for my country's school system from the fact that this probably being a bad idea wouldn't even have occurred to me without you mentioning it. When I was 10 - or for that matter any age - and disagreed with my teachers, they'd just look up the right answer in some authoritative reference and admit to being wrong if necessary. I thought this was the norm everywhere.
Right, it's both.
When I was in high school, I got a lot of Bs and Cs -- not because I didn't understand the material, but because the homework was so uninteresting that I didn't bother to do it. I slept through most of my classes -- they were slow enough that I didn't need to be awake, and the more sleep I got at school, the less sleep I needed at home, and the more free time I got -- so I got bad participation grades.
And then there was an AP Computer Science class I took, taught by a business teacher drafted into it by the administration. She didn't know the first thing about the material, so I got points docked for doing things she didn't understand, points docked for correcting her errors on the tests, points docked for going on IRC instead of listening to her lecture incoherently on things I already knew... and I had friends in the class who were in the exact same situation. She eventually cooked up some ridiculous scheme to try to get us all expelled: she falsely accused us of running a credit card fraud ring. And it worked.
Yes. Understanding exactly how to play the system is about more than IQ.
Especially those smart kids that would do much better when they would drop out of school might not reach the highest scores in standardized tests.