Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interest and motivation comes largely from success. You try something, it works, it feels good so you continue doing that. The school's role is to enable this "easy success" early on so kids will continue.
I find this point of view somewhat difficult to support. It was the whole motivation behind the cultural shift towards 'everybody's a winner' - participation trophies, expanding honor roll with 'merit roll', character awards, personal achievement awards, and so on. But far from driving excellence across the rather vast number of fields where it was trialed, it only seems to correlate with the period of overall declin…
We all saw the "draw the owl" picture. Step 1 is easy step 2 is easy but then the rest appears impossible. Why not make a series of small, doable steps that lead to the result? The "hardness" of many things is not exponential, it's linear or even less dramatic.