Empathy deficiency is definitively not what the battle school was looking for. It's the reverse - they wanted someone capable of emphathizing with his enemy whi

Empathy deficiency is definitively not what the battle school was looking for. It's the reverse - they wanted someone capable of emphathizing with his enemy while still willing to destroy them with no hesitation. The obvious counterpoint in the story is his brother Peter: he's just as brilliant as Ender, but gets rejected by the academy explicitly for being a sociopath.