Attentional Authority
In response to my post last week about attention my twin sister sent me a 1942 Simone Weil essay on attention in the context of Catholic education. In it Weil makes the case for the instrumental utility of cultivating students’ ability to be attentive, for the careful study of any subject is worthwhile practice for the study of the one divine subject: “They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed towards God, is the very substance of prayer.” Weil’s concern is simply that students pay attention to something; mine is that which students pay attention to, so today I focus on sketching the landscape of possibilities for organizing this important decision-making process.
Attention misdirection
I summarized last week my picture of the insidious cycles of attention capture, exploitation, sleep loss, isolation, and focus degradation on which our current media and entertainment ecosystems profit, so I do share Weil’s interest in cultivating student’s ability to be attentive. A few days after writing that post, I found this useful but troubling summary of Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention which further documents many causes and effects of this bleak state of attentional affairs.
One’s ability to meaningfully pay attention at all is no doubt a prerequisite to being able to contribute to the world, but even the students who are best able to focus are primarily pushed to apply this focus only in service of their ability to perform on rote standardized tests. Many are the infamous Excellent Sheep of our elite institutions, indulging for decades — at the behest of adults in power — in attention for attention’s sake. Attention misdirected is still attention wasted.
There are enough pressing problems and intellectually stimulating, interdisciplinary, and accessible possible solutions that it is just about unjustifiable to me to direct more than a decade of a students’ life sharpening their mind against a grindstone so different from what we actually hope students will one day do with their attention.
While protecting and restoring our students’ ability to pay attention we must also work to carefully design and build coalitions that can wisely direct it.
After attention
Even once we make progress on the habits and systems that allow students to pay attention, we must then still tackle a similarly challenging question of what exactly they should pay attention to. For Weil writing to Father Perrin the answer was prayer to God, but for most in our world today it is not nearly as clear or totalizing.
Even considering this “attention to what?” question narrowly is to wade into hyper-politicized debates about corners of the curricular cannon, banned books, and implicit ideologies. Though in many cases important and legitimate culture battle, these disputes distract — and perhaps even comfort — educators from the fact that in our rapidly changing world we have so weak a grasp on the realities for which we are preparing our kids. (To appreciate the extreme of this phenomenon, one might call to mind those ancient lawmakers questioning Zuck about how the internet works.)
This is the quandary of education in metacrisis, in a time between worlds. It is hard to prepare for that which we do not yet understand, so we’re left shrugging and tossing together a checklist of 21st Century Skills for generalists who we hope might still be useful in our economic systems in 15 years.
I, like many others, do have some specific ideas about that which we should have students pay attention to, but I see the bedrock issue not as the challenge of settling on the right set of subjects and competencies for students to learn today, but that of creating systems that allow each successive coalition of generations to identify for themselves the suite of skills, knowledge, and habits that they uniquely need to keep humanity and our world alive and well.
(Ok, we may be in an era when it is actually particularly critical to get the “that which” question right quickly, so I’ll tip my hand a bit and highlight School of Humanity’s model of six curricular domains: Thought, Discovery, Flourishing, Creativity, Action, and Society.)
So today I consider how the authority to decide what exactly students should pay attention to may be distributed. I arrange my sketch along a spectrum measuring student agency in the process, from a fully external source of authority to a completely student-driven model.
External attentional authority
On one end of the spectrum are models that allocate all decision making authority to a power external to the student whose attention is being directed. Almost all traditional school models enact some form of this top-down authority.
The component parts of these models are differentiable by the relational proximity of the external authority to an individual student. An external power farthest removed from the student might be the national government adopting a universal curriculum, and one nearby would be a single teacher making decisions for their own classroom. In between states, districts, and schools all may maintain some level of control over that which students must be attentive to.
Most public educational systems contain elements of each of these decision-making structures: a teacher has some wiggle room to teach what and how they want, but are heavily constrained by the objectives of the school, which is constrained by the district or state, which all are subject to national mandates.
Even when these constraints are not explicit (ie. in independent schools or homeschool consortiums), the gates that guard access to higher education (standardized tests, AP exams, rigor signaling) have a homogenizing effect on that which students spend twelve years paying attention to through no choice of their own.
For an external source of authority to be successful long-term in this attentional direction, the student needs either to:
- By coincidence be genuinely interested in that which the authority declares is important,
- Develop interest over time in that which they are told to learn based on their trust that the authority figure has knowledge to share about the world and a genuine desire to prepare them for it, or
- Recognize and be motivated by incentives for being attentive that are not related to the actual subject matter at hand, such as earning college admission or signaling desirable traits and capacities.
As the world changes but core subjects stay the same #1 becomes less and less likely and as students increasingly see adults as negligent and out-of-touch #2 becomes unlikely too. Success condition #3 is tenuous as well if students feel betrayed by economic or social systems that do not in fact provide the incentives they felt promised.
Not only are these models of external attentional authority therefore standing on shaky ground, but they alone are also unlikely to be the right fit in a prefigurative, rapidly changing world like ours where the young quickly develop a better appreciation for the world into which they are growing up than the adults around them.
Student control
On the other end of the spectrum would be complete student agency — full independent study, all the time. Complete adherence to this approach might still permit some mentorship or input from adults or institutions, but only at the request of students who are ultimately self-guiding their educational journey.
Certain types of children’s play might be the only persistent example of this kind of attentional freedom in American culture, and even these are of course under threat too from both invasive technology and helicopter parenting, giving rise to the likes of the free-range parenting movement.
But both during and beyond early childhood it would be hard to defend complete student autonomy to direct their learning. We are social animals who naturally and quite reasonably look to our elders in order to learn what to pay attention to. We need not throw this baby out even if we try to shift the authority over attention more towards the learner.
Mixed models
Most hybrid models are examples of codominance: simply the simultaneous presence of both ends of the spectrum. For example, core classes are mapped out for students for their whole 12 years, but they slowly gain some freedom to choose electives or perhaps take on an “independent” study.
What we likely need instead is a more creative blending of the strengths of each authority paradigm or potential authority figure. We have to ask what it is specifically that each potential wielder of authority — states, schools, parents, and students — has to contribute to the all-important project of directing the attention of our society’s young.
Nations and states can perhaps uniquely establish long-term, holistic educational agendas given their access to information about broad trends and economies of scale for research and implementation. Districts and schools can contribute more specific regional knowledge and cultural relevance. Parents’ value systems can inform what students prioritize. And of course students themselves need far more agency to report back to these external figures about their lived experience in the world emerging around them and to make decisions about directing their own attention.
Many organizations are investigating and experimenting in interesting ways, including several I have been connected to like City as a School, Brave Generation Academy, OneStone, and Powderhouse Studios. Here grow the seeds of innovation for the systems that could replace the dominant model of external authority.
Education is fundamentally a process of attention direction, and therefore must be done with the utmost care, for, returning to the Ian McGilchrist quote from my last post:
“Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world.”
