The idea that everyone must be an expert in one thing

Kids are very cognitively flexible; it is school with its multiple choice tasks, regimental learning, and compartmentalization of subjects that has scorched that flexibility, that creativity, that inherent ability to see the world outside of single disciplinary boundaries … see it polymathically.

Professionally, the pursuit of more than one job, field or interest has become synonymous with financial suicide. A negative stigma has been attached to the non-specialist, whose ‘time-wasting activity’ is perceived to come at the expense of his livelihood. Demeaning the polymath as a financially doomed creature is a practice entrenched in the prov