Schooling can be engineered to train attention for exploitation rather than liberation.

Evidence

This is not to say that the social formation of attention is inherently virtuous. As often as not, schools have served to acculturate new generations to kinds of attention that consign them to lifeways of cramped spirits and even outright exploitation. Look no further than the Industrial Revolution, which brought about the classroom as quasi-factory of mind-numbingly rote tasks and corporeal discipline. The fresh-faced lads and lasses of Birmingham were learning to attend, yes—but the ways of seeing and doing that they acquired were mostly prefabricated for the exercise of dull and demeaning labor. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 292

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Frankfurt School critique of education as ideological reproduction and Foucault’s disciplinary institutions; also echoes the Industrial Revolution rationalization theme in prior Frankfurt School reading. — connects to: Classrooms either reproduce or resist systems of oppression through education. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 332; Higher education reinforces obedience to authority rather than independent thought. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 17; Schooling legitimately transmits the attentional modes that let people shape their world. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 290
• ADDENDUM: This complicates and enriches the ‘human fracking’ thesis by showing formal attention-training predates the frack-masters and was itself used as an extraction tool.