Hamish MacEwan

The root of this encouragement of fragmented attention is in the political ideal of equality.

Intellectual equality is impossible to establish. Given a mission to establish equality among students, schools adjust protocol to fudge a result that looks like limited success.

To achieve this, schools train students to be distracted and uncomfortable with the long periods of focus and daydreaming that otherwise arise in many people. This prevents individual students from pulling ahead of the herd unless they fall out of line.

If most of the students graduate with mediocre levels of knowledge and skill, that’s less important than if they are all within the same general range of mediocrity. Excellence in anything requires focused practice — when an athlete shows exceptional talent, schools may break some rules to accommodate their longer and more intensive practice hours.

Encouraging such deliberate practice, focus, and the sorting of the capable from the incapable necessarily undermines equality within the greater body of students. In a democracy which is supposed to encourage universal political participation with equal standing for all, this can only be tolerated to the extent to which it’s absolutely necessary.

Permitting this sort of specialization always causes serious ‘disparate impact’ to emerge: women and men will succeed in different areas, different racial groups pull ahead or behind, and some of the duller or more aggressive types are too useless for any responsibility whatsoever.

Training internally fragmented people creates a more similar populace which is less separated into the disparate specialties from which many of our surnames derive. With some help from scientific management, the baker can be interchangeable with the candlestick maker, and the son of the dentist can be encouraged to pursue his dreams to become a circus juggler. This emphasizes the larger political narrative that all people are interchangeable and that all people can determine their own fates if they have good school attendance and study hard enough.