Hal vs. Stice, Steeply and deLint in the crowd
These kids, the best of them are here to learn to see. […] To forget themselves as objects of attention for a few years and see what they can do when the eyes are off them.
Context
DeLint lays out E.T.A.'s whole doctrine as the exact photographic negative of the theme, and the dramatic irony is total — he's saying it to a spy who exists to be a set of watching eyes. The Academy's entire pedagogy is anti-spectation: train the gifted child to see rather than to be seen, to get lost in the game while "the eyes are off them," because the era's default is the opposite ruinous condition, the self dissolved into an object of attention. It's the supply-side counterpart to the passive viewer — the performing body has to be inoculated against the same spectacle-appetite that turns the audience into pure eyes, or the Show will consume it. The school is a quarantine against being watched.