The Use of “Attention Capture” Technologies in Our Classrooms Has Created a Crisis 

The real question today is what we are going to do about the attention crisis in our classroom. This question is urgent, because those largely responsible for the crisis—profit-driven technologists—have already started offering up new, even more invasive solutions. These most often take the form of brain-based technologies: devices that can either actively read brain activity in order to monitor the neural “patterns” of attention, or which directly intervene in the brain’s activity in order to modify or enhance attention. One example is MIT Media Lab’s AttentivU glasses, which use EEG sensors and eye-tracking tech to assess the wearer’s attentional state; if the glasses determine that their user is distracted, they will transmit the noise of chirping birds directly to the user’s brain, to remind them to ”pay attention” (users can also elect to wear a pin, which will administer a teensy bit of “haptic feedback” as well). Another is BrainCo’s headband, which has been tested in classrooms, and purports to send “real-time brainwave data to a teacher’s dashboard to indicate [a student’s] levels of attention and engagement.”

A future of ghostly bird noises, self-administered shocks and brain-reports on our children’s attention activity is not our only possible future. We have a real alternative: We can allow educators to prioritize the teaching of attention in classrooms and make attention formation an explicit part of school curricula.

There are many ways we could incorporate attention more fully into our classrooms. The first concerns “voluntary attention,” and involves a return to a set of historical practices. By voluntary attention, I don’t mean our common understanding of sustained focus, where one labors without actual distraction to lock the mind, by sheer willpower, onto a single object for an indefinite amount of time. Rather, I am thinking of the definition offered by the pioneering French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839–1916), who defined voluntary attention as a learned ability, one that enabled a person “to render attractive, by artifice, what is not so by nature; to give an artificial interest to things that have no natural interest.” Ribot believed that, through deliberate training, people could learn to bring an otherwise passive faculty of attention under largely conscious and active control. In the late 19th century, a battery of pedagogues and educational psychologists put this belief into practice, composing manuals filled with exercises training students in making the appropriate “efforts to bring passive attention under active control.” While some of these exercises are strange and beguiling, others are surprisingly fruitful, and there is much work to be done in experimenting with them in our own era of industrial attention harvesting (especially those exercises which detail methods for gradually acquiring abilities to handle increasingly audacious and disruptive distractions).

Recently, however, much work has also been done with that other form of “sustained attention,” which the psychologists of the 19th century thought impossible for the human mind to achieve: uninterrupted, pure, distractionless focus on a chosen object, person, or idea. Drawing both on traditional meditative practices and cognitive behavioral treatments for ADHD, a broad set of approaches have been developed under the rubric of “contemplative pedagogies”—some of which have even been stress-tested in psychology laboratories, with promising results. Beginning with simple mindfulness exercises, students are brought to directly engage with the limitations of their own attention span, from which point they are taught to expand those limits as they are guided in the acquisition of greater self-possession and resilience.

These are just two of many ways of tackling the idea. As I said, much work needs to be done. What we know, for sure, is that it needs to be done. We cannot keep relying on technology to do the work that only voluntary human attention can do.

There is a profound danger associated with using extrinsic, technological means to induce attention-like “behaviors” in students. Any effective attempt to circumvent the free exercise of student attention also entails a proportionate diminishment in student agency. The formation of attention is the formation of agency. To the extent that we take shortcuts, and get attention-like outcomes in our classrooms by non-attentional means—to this same extent we fail to form our students’ capacity for self-determination. Every time we use an attention-capture tool, instead of teaching student how to actually direct and control their attention, we habituate them further to unfreedom.

We find ourselves in this situation because we tried to get the effect of attention—sustained absorption—by a means other than the free, voluntary, consensual attention of the individual. Overwhelmingly, we tried to capture attention and hold it—rather than cultivate attention in others and empower them to freely give it. We need to give our own attention to the attention crisis, and help form in children the capacity to do the same. We need to make attention formation an explicit focus in the classroom—and in the curriculum.