Children’s inattention often reflects unlistenable teaching, not distraction

Evidence

After several decades of pedagogical experience and reflection, Robert Caron, director of the Centre Paris Lecture, recently positioned himself in opposition to many of the grievances concerning ‘children’s lack of attention, their restlessness, manic channel-hopping, their lack of inclination to listen to the sacred word of adults’. Rather than jump on the bandwagon of medicalized solutions or blame the internet, understood as a distraction machine, he suggested turning the problem back on teachers: children ‘don’t listen because there is nothing to hear’ in many of the words they are offered. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 260

Categorization

• SEED: Angle on the attention-deficit debate: reframing student distraction as a failure of the material to merit attention, an inversion of the ‘internet distracted them’ narrative.
• XREF: connects to: Complaints about youthful inattention may partly reflect declining authority — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 474; So-called attention deficit is misdirected attention, not absence of attention — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 513; Attention deficit disorders partly reflect unhealthy attention environments — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 258 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone #expands (0.78)
• The capitulation-versus-rigor teaching debate can be reframed by attention ecology #responds-to (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 262
• Inattentive engagement with a task is a learned sophisticated capacity #expands (0.74) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 519