Oh yes. I was thinking more of the "If you can't pay for health care you should just get two jobs" argument, but people do expect kids to transcend their environment in a lot of ways.

I am superficially a great example of self improvement: I went to a terrible primary school but taught myself a lot of stuff off educational tv and books etc, then got a scholarship to a good highschool and then a scholarship to do a Phd, all despite my parents not having much money for most of that period.
But
(a)I'm very academic, and people shouldn't have to be as academic as me to get a halfway decent education (my medium-scholarly siblings didn't get scholarships and ended up dropping out of their local state highschool, though they ended up in tertiary education after a few rough years)
(b)I would have been screwed if Australia didn't have a mostly ok state-funded education system, especially for my undergraduate degree.
(c) My parents are very pro-education, encouraged and helped me learn, and did things like taking me to a lot of scholarship application exams.