A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.
In a 2022 Atlantic article about Fred Rogers, Adelia Moore recounts her experience in the 1970s as a one-time guest on an episode of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and her subsequent friendship with him. In addition to his “gentleness, kindness, and empathy,” she describes the most magnetic and distinctive part of Mr. Rogers’ persona as his attentiveness, claiming that the character trait that made him such a powerful figure was “his capacity to pay attention.” This capacity, she laments, has become increasingly rare in today’s world.
Attention as a necessary and threatened resource has been on the minds of many (if not all) of us in higher education for a long time, especially those of us who think about undergraduate education in vocational terms. For obvious reasons, that concern intensified during and after the pandemic: on this blog in 2021, Jason Stevens argued that attention may be the resource most under threat in our current moment. In the last decade, several books—by authors like Tim Wu, Jenny Odell, and Chris Hayes—attest to this ongoing and worsening threat. Jonathan Haidt, author of the widely read The Anxious Generation, has recently said that he increasingly sees the assault on children’s attention as on par with the mental health consequences he attributes to children’s smartphone use.
My contention is that, in order to help students develop their attentive faculties, we must not only help them see the problem clearly (which so many of them are already acutely aware of); we also need to give them active ways of reclaiming and strengthening their capacity for sustained focus. One way to do that is to name the classroom an attention gym—a space where a key goal is to develop the muscles we need to become more attentive people.
Continue reading “The Attention Gym: Building Capacity for Attentiveness in the Classroom”