Attention, please!

We are losing the liberty of controlling our own minds. And education must be restructured to meet this challenge.

The corporations that define our economy are manipulating and harvesting our individual focus in unprecedented ways. This is “attention capitalism,” and authors Chris Hayes and Jonathan Haidt have each called out its dangers, demonstrating how much of our selves— our minds, our souls — are determined by our ability to pay attention and how, now, technology has hijacked that ability.

One approach to combat this is to change our attentional environment to help us resist the fracturing of our focus, such as by banning phones in classrooms. As essential as such recommendations are, attention is also an individual skill, a muscle that requires building. Indeed, this could be seen as the central task of education: the cultivation of the control of our own minds through the increased powers of attention.

If we were to take this as an organizing principle for all of education, what would that look like?

An essential first step would be to keep classes small, limiting distraction. Human connection would be a second key, because unmediated interaction with others is one of the most compelling, focusing experiences of our lives. To that end, face-to-face conversation must be central, incentivizing engaged speaking and active listening.

We would not seek to rescue or distract students from perplexity, silence and boredom, because the essence of attention is the ability to persevere through these discomforts. We would foreground deep prompts for attention — the richness of books and works of art, the complexity of natural phenomena and the intricacy of craftsmanship — as these things provide ever-deepening rewards for focused regard. We would consign to the margins digital technology, artificial intelligence and the thin, accelerated dopamine loop that drives almost all of our constant connectivity.

Of course, these tools for deepening attention are hardly new. This is the essence of liberal (“freeing”) education, as it has been practiced for centuries.

We know from mounting research that the practices core to this humanistic education — reading books and conversing with others, silent reflection and tuning out the technological stimuli — do detoxify us. We do recover. Just two weeks away from screens reduces psychological problems in children. People who are more socially connected have higher cognitive scores. Reading and discussing fiction, especially literary fiction, improves well-being, increases empathy and can decrease depressive symptoms for years. Deep reading literally reshapes the brain, as neuroscientist and reading expert Maryanne Wolf has shown, allowing us to “enter a cognitive space where we can connect the decoded information to all that we know and feel.”

At the small college I lead, St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico, we see this in our students: Many of our freshmen arrive with diminished abilities, unprepared to study as rigorously as we do. But over four years in our sanctuary-like mountain setting studying a great books curriculum that ranges from Homer, Plato and Augustine to Einstein, Joyce and Arendt, they acquire the focus needed to write and then discuss their senior essays on, for example, the intricacies of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit.”

It is perhaps not surprising that the medicine to treat the new challenges of our time would be so ancient. As Hayes points out, attention capitalism is preying on vulnerabilities of human nature that have always been with us. He invokes the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal: “When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” Liberal education was designed from the beginning to remedy this.

But at just the time when we need such education the most, our educational institutions face unprecedented economic and political pressures — declining enrollments, reduced funding, rising costs, legislative interference that challenges academic freedom and curricular choices. The value of education itself is under scrutiny, and higher education has experienced an unprecedented loss of our collective confidence. During the confirmation hearing of now-Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the only thing our two parties seemed to agree upon is that our system of education is disastrously failing our young people and that success is determined by how cost-effectively it prepares them for successful careers.

As educators, we should not retreat under this onslaught. We should instead find renewed purpose in doing what we’ve always known how to do well — deepen attention, cultivate free and self-possessed humans, and create the capacity to find fulfillment in whatever life presents to us.

In doing so, we can empower the next generation to navigate, perhaps even cure, the technological and political dystopia of an economy in which our own minds have become the commodity that attention capitalism markets and trades.

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J. Walter Sterling is the president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M.

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