Schools form attention in ways that can serve exploitation, not just freedom

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Echoes the Foucault-style reading of institutions as attention-discipline, connecting to the reader’s interests in power and control.

Related

• Schooling can be engineered to train attention for exploitation rather than liberation. (similarity 0.94)
• Ordinary schooling trains the workforce that sustains the attention economy (similarity 0.83)
• Schools are wherever focused attention is collectively learned and practiced (similarity 0.82)
• The collective attentional ecosystem, not the teacher, is the classroom’s agent. (similarity 0.79)
• A school for attention activism was founded in Brooklyn in 2023 (similarity 0.79)
• Concern about attention span misdirects effort from recovering deeper attentional modes (similarity 0.78)