In the debate about a tiered school system, it is fitting to lean on Thomas Mann. In The Magic Mountain, he writes: "A man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries." To understand our epoch and be equipped for the upheavals around us, academically and practically inclined students must challenge each other. Therefore, schools must be a place where different abilities and perspectives meet.
I graduated from high school last year, and I reflect on my own education with the question of academic tracking in mind. I do not recall that learning the circumference of a circle early on was what shaped me the most. Rather, it was discussions with students whose intuition was completely different from my own that taught me the most. The question of tracking becomes even more pressing when looking at the labor market following the advent of artificial intelligence. I believe, however, that this question pushes us in favor of a comprehensive school system. Even AI evangelist and Oil Fund CEO Nicolai Tangen points in this direction: "We will end up talking to each other and getting closer to one another as humans," as mood music, visual arts, and jobs are replaced by the probability models from Silicon Valley.
The longer we hold on to a shared foundation of knowledge and values throughout schooling, the more resilient our democracy becomes. Students discussing Columbus, conjugations and cosines across ability levels is a virtue greater than the cult of the individual and specialization. Although it might cost meager percentage points on Nasjonale prøver, friction is central to building unity and learning from one another. This friction is not about pulling everyone toward the median, but about learning translation skills and empathy. The ability to collaborate across disciplines will remain paramount when AI reduces the scarcity of intelligence. It is certainly important that students receive challenges tailored to their own level, but we must protect the platforms we have for understanding our contemporaries, especially when democracy is facing headwinds.
Due to AI's current lack of hands, future jobs may lean closer to the practical domain. Perhaps practically inclined students in a tiered school – often regarded as the losers of tiering – could gain something from this, but overall, it would still be a loss for both parties. By isolating the strongest academic performers in a tracked school, we deprive them of the opportunity to acquire what machines lack. It is a disservice to hyper-specialize the strongest students for the sake of learning Pythagoras’ early, at the expense of social and interdisciplinary robustness.
A school with friction, where everyone learns to collaborate across differences, is a perfect complement to the boundless cognition of machines. Even in a tiered school, the top students will struggle to surpass the cognitive capacity of the AI models we will surround ourselves with in a few years, if not today. Whether or not the AI models will manage to navigate the life of its epoch and contemporaries will remain a question for another time.