On the Sir Ken Fallacy

Or a book review of Johann Hari's 'Stolen Focus'

Photo by Dragos Gontariu on Unsplash

I took my first proper Christmas break in four years recently. It was the holiday I didn’t know I needed. After a difficult year, I have decided to focus on study, and this was the first break I’ve had since before COVID-19 where I haven’t had to prepare for a new role, write new units for a syllabus change, write a Masters thesis or publish a paper.

I made a strong commitment to get back into reading. I think there are two kinds of readers: those who read in snatches—on the bus, in the post office queue—and those who build a den around themselves, reclining with cups of tea, throw blankets, and nice-smelling candles, ready to hunker down for a good six hours. I am firmly in the latter camp.

It was surprisingly challenging to get back into sustained reading for extended periods. I felt guilty doing the literary equivalent of bed-rotting, but the most shocking thing was that reading demanded so much of me emotionally. I had forgotten the way that deep reading of novels requires so much cognitive effort and commitment. Reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves brought me to tears several times, as did My Brilliant Friend, one of the last literary mysteries.

Not to dive into therapy here, but I think true crime on Netflix is filling a stimulation gap — people need to feel empathy in a way that they used to do through books. The content machine is woefully unable to satisfy this need, so true crime amps up the senses as a substitute. It’s becoming harder to imagine a young person sitting still for more than the 20 minutes needed to truly immerse themselves in the printed word, when streaming is so available.

Deciding to read Cormac McCarthy’s catalogue over 2025 felt fitting, though I interspersed it with Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus. McCarthy is impossible to teach, so reading him without that pressure was its own luxury. Given the weight of his work, I also needed something lighter to counter the darkness. In my state of hard-core repose, it was the perfect choice to help me recalibrate aspects of my life and priorities.

Stolen Focus is a great read for teachers, who work with students who have only known the always-on life. I force myself to read (with head-scratching and horror) the work of Jean Twenge and Freya India, to learn about this increasingly foreign world. Sidenote: my kids sometimes have to post on Instagram for me because I don’t really know how!

But to pretend the bloodsucking attention economy is only an issue for younger people is patently false and the book confronts we adults with our poor habits. I don’t know if my resolutions will last, but the book inspired me to buy a Brick and start tracking my time on Harvest. Teachers are prone to hyperproductivity and striving, and increasingly this means keeping up with the teacher-socials and then entering into vegetative scrolling during downtime. No, I’m not projecting!

The book also addresses the rising prevalence of ADHD in young people, exploring whether its causes are environmental or biological. It presents a balanced range of views, including research suggesting that therapy—such as family counselling or trauma intervention—can be beneficial. But in reality, medication is often the more accessible and immediate option. While stimulants are effective for many, Hari rightly leaves the broader question of whether we are over-pathologising attention struggles open.

I liked the way Hari researched widely, but also acknowledged that a lot of the proposed solutions to our attention leakage could be categorised as “cruel optimism”. Solutions like, “Just put limits on your phone”, often tend to come from wealthy tech execs who send their own kids to Montessori schools with a dumb phone. Cruel optimism feels like the sister to Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs, where oversimplified advice is given out from on high.

Despite this concession, Hari falls into the Sir Ken trap when he starts to talk about how schooling may be the solution to the pervasive influence of the attention economy and its consequences. Sir Ken’s TED talk on creativity has received tens of millions of views and done untold damage, because it perpetuates a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of knowledge in education.

Paul Kirschner calls viral deepities like this the ‘expertise generalisation syndrome,’ where someone famous and therefore credible gives an authoritative sounding spin on all that’s wrong with education. We see the same thing here with Hari, a bestselling author who despite his godawfully stifling education became… a bestselling author. He seems to pin blame for the decline in human attention not just on the tech-behemoth that seems to be taking over the world, but on schooling.

The Sir Ken Fallacy is the misleading belief that education stifles creativity, promoting student-led learning as the ideal while ignoring the essential role of knowledge acquisition, cognitive science, and the privilege required for such models to succeed.¹

Hari recalls his hated school years, where he was “treated like a prisoner”, forbidden from choosing whatever he wanted to learn and forced into following a timetable. He talks in his book about an alternative school where students decide what they want to learn and there are no lessons. Children create origami and build forts in between snippets of learning Hebrew or whatever they fancy. The fees are around $10,000. Cruel optimism much?

Noam Chomsky went to a Deweyite school; Lars von Trier’s parents declined to create rules for their children. Radically student-led schooling can work where there’s privilege and protection in abundance. Of course we all want to see students learning spontaneously and autonomously. But this is not realistic, practical or aligned with what cognitive science tells us about how students learn.

Hari makes no distinction between biologically primary learning, problem-solving through play fort-building, and biologically secondary learning, the kind needed to build an actual fort. Could it be that privileged students come with a greater foundation of secondary knowledge to build upon and are therefore immune to experimentation? For an in-depth answer, Brian Huskie does a great job.

My family and I have been bingeing a fantastically cringeworthy show on Netflix that illustrates the Sir Ken Fallacy so well. On Alaskan Bush People, we see what happens when we unschool a group of seven children, some now adults, giving them full creativity and freedom. They’re free to make mistakes (like set their house on fire and sink several boats.) They’re free to invent new technologies (like headphones made out of garbage). They’re also free of the money needed for dentists.

Socially isolated, they find it difficult to attract a mate to their pile of sticks and moss. For most of the show, they are essentially homeless, living on boats and in tents. They spend their time decorating their makeshift homes with things like “carpet” and “lighting”, items that can be bought with, I don’t know, an education and a job. More recently, several family members have been plagued by legal issues and addiction.

Of course Hari and Sir Ken would think this kind of unschooling was a wonderful thing, just not something they would wish on their own children.

1. Not a real fallacy, but it is now!