The canon · Systems & justice
One hidden assumption — that growth runs in a straight line — quietly decides who gets to stay in the room.
There’s an assumption so common we rarely see it as an assumption at all: that progress is a line. You start at the beginning, move through the middle, arrive at the end. Grade one, then grade two. Junior, then senior. Step one before step two, always, for everyone. It sounds less like a belief than like a description of reality. It isn’t. It’s a choice about how to arrange things — and like any choice, it has winners, and it has people it quietly costs.
I call it violence, and I mean the word, though the violence is rarely loud. It’s the violence of a shape imposed on people it doesn’t fit — the slow harm of being told, again and again, that the way your mind actually moves is a failure to move correctly. Nobody raises their voice. A form just won’t accept your answer. A curriculum simply moves on without you. A performance review notes, regretfully, that you didn’t progress in the expected sequence. The line doesn’t argue with you. It just leaves.
The straight line smuggles in a whole theory of how understanding works: that it accumulates evenly, one unit at a time, in a fixed order, at a roughly constant rate. For some minds, some of the time, that’s a fair description. For a great many of us it is simply false. Understanding arrives in bursts and plateaus. It comes out of order — the “advanced” idea landing first and the “basic” one only making sense much later. It shows up all at once as a whole shape, and then asks to be unpacked backward. None of that is confusion. It’s just a different route through the same territory.
A straight line is only the shortest path if you were already standing at its start, facing the right way. For everyone else it’s the scenic route through their own disadvantage.
The cost is not evenly distributed, and that’s what makes it a justice question and not just a design quibble. The people most likely to move through material non-linearly — to loop, to leap, to need the whole before the parts — are disproportionately the people already least served: neurodivergent people, people whose first knowledge came from lived experience rather than institutions, anyone whose mind was shaped somewhere the standard sequence wasn’t written for. The line doesn’t just fail them. It fails them and then reads the failure as evidence about *them*, not about the line.
Watch what actually happens over time. A cohort starts together. The sequence assumes a pace; some fall behind it, not because they understand less but because they understand differently. Falling behind the sequence gets recorded as falling behind, full stop. That record follows them — into the next gate, the next tracking decision, the next room they’re allowed or not allowed into. I have been the person quietly sorted out of a room I understood perfectly well, for the crime of not arriving at it in order. By the end, the room is full of people who happened to match the line, and everyone has agreed to call that merit.
That’s the quiet engine of a great deal of exclusion. Not a gatekeeper deciding you don’t belong — a *shape* deciding it for everyone, invisibly, while the humans involved feel like they’re just following the obvious way things are done. The obviousness is the trap. A system feels neutral precisely when its assumptions match your own, which is exactly when you can no longer see them.
The point of naming this isn’t despair; it’s design. Once you can see the line as a choice, you can choose differently — and it turns out you lose almost nothing by doing so. You can build a course, a workplace, a form, a path that offers more than one route through. Let people see the whole first and move around inside it. Let others take it step by step in sequence. Let people cross between the two whenever they need to, without penalty, without it meaning anything about their worth.
That’s not a lowering of standards; it’s the removal of an irrelevant one. The straight line was never the thing we actually cared about — understanding was. When you stop mistaking the shape of the path for the destination, the room fills up with people who were capable all along, and who were only ever excluded by a line nobody remembered choosing. Retire the line, and you find out how much of what you called merit was just a match.