John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, write about what matters most to students today: learning to pay attention in a world of screens and distractions.

He writes:

D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt begin their New York Times opinion piece, “Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can fight Back,” with an eloquent version of a statement that should have long been obvious:

We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.

Then Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt use equally insightful language to explain why “We Can Fight Back” against “the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.” They recall that “for two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy.” Today we face widespread complaints that reading is being undermined by “perpetual distraction,” due to commercial use of digital technologies. They add, “What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”

“Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back” calls for a “revolution [which] starts in our classrooms.” They explain, “We must flip the script on teachers’ perennial complaint. Instead of fretting that students’ flagging attention doesn’t serve education, we must make attention itself the thing being taught.” They draw upon the work of “informal coalitions of educators, activists and artists who are conducting grass-roots experiments to try to make that possible. Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt call it “attention activism.

Due to these worldwide efforts, “common ground is rediscovered in the weave of collective attention.” They seek ways “to create, beyond the confines of our personalized digital universes, something resembling a shared world.” One set of starting places, museums, public libraries, universities, as well as classrooms, remind me of a time when I was a student, and the first half of my teaching career, when field trips were widely celebrated, and before critical thinking was subordinated to test prep.

“Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can fight Back” recommends another practice that I’ve long struggled with, “observations of absolutely whatever unfolds in the world,” in order pay “particular attention to the supposedly mundane … events that might under normal circumstances have gone unnoted.” It reminded me of a conversation with a student where we agreed that we don’t want to depend on beer or marijuana in order to fully appreciate a sunset. It was hard for me to later realize that I also took that shortcut in order to slow down and fully appreciate such beauty.

Next, I left my computer, and my dog and I got into our complicated new hybrid car to take a short ride to the park for a walk. Of course, the irony of driving to the walk is obvious. Then I figured out how to push the buttons for defrosting the window, rather than scrape the ice off. But then, technology taught me a new skill for paying attention to “normal circumstances” that had “gone unnoted.” I became enthralled the bubbles that broke loose from the coat of ice as it melted and dripped down the windshield. (Perhaps due to that experience, the park’s beautiful fall colors were even more awesome.)

Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt also reminded me of conversations I had had as a young Baby Boomer with family members, neighbors and other mentors. So many adults coached me on developing “inner directedness,” not “outer-directedness,” and to not be “like the Red River, a mile wide and a foot deep.” I was taught that my real goal shouldn’t be higher grades, but “learning how to learn.” And I’ll never forget the elementary school principal who took us to the junior high to watch Edward R. Murrow interviewing John Maynard Keynes, about the real purpose of school – which was not getting a job. Our goal should be learning how to learn how to be creative after technology reduced the workweek into 15 hours.

Of course, that hopefulness seems laughable today, but it brings us back to Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt and their diagnosis of why today’s technology has become so destructive. They linked to ATTENTION LIBERATION MOVEMENTS(or ALMS) that resist the “powerful new financial, commercial, and technological system that is commodifying human attention as never before.” It promotes “RADICAL HUMAN ATTENTION” to nurture “unrivaled access to the goodness of life;” and second, “that present circumstances present new and imperiling obstacles to human attentional capacities.” For instance, these bottom-up efforts seek to educate young people how, “We operate in a world in which attention is increasingly bought and sold. Bought and sold by powerful interests, pursuing wealth — pursuing ‘eyeballs,’” on screens.

And, of course, the subsequent undermining of inner-directedness, social ties, and critical thinking paved the way to today’s rightwing assault on democracy.

Although I was never as eloquent as Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt, but I’ve unsuccessfully advocated for their type of approach for a quarter of a century. My first encounter with a cell phone occurred the day after a gang-related murder when my students affiliated with the “Crips” stared at a new student, a “Blood,” who was secretly typing into a gadget I’d never seen before, who was requesting armed backup. Given the way that cell phones, predictably, increased violence and, predictably, undermined classroom instruction, I lobbied for our school to commit to regulating phones and engaging in cross-generational conversations about digital literacy and ethics.

Although I personally communicated with my students about “using digital technology,” but “not being used by it,” our school system refused to touch these issues. Before long, watching students who were glued to their phones, it seemed obvious we were also facing a crisis of loneliness, made much, much worse by screen time.

My personal experience thus gives me reasons for both hope and pessimism. Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt build on the same human community strengths that were crucial for me, and embraced by students in our phone-free classroom. But I can’t ignore the three decades of refusals by the systems I’ve worked with to tackle the challenge.

Then again, on the same day that the New York Times commentary was published, National Public Radio reported that California “joins a growing movement to teach media literacy.” The next day, the Washington Post called on parents to support a ban on smartphones. So, maybe the time is right for the wisdom of Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt, who make the case for “what democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”