Pliny writes that Aristomachus "was so amazed at the behavior of bees that for fifty-eight years he did nothing but observe them." There are true athletes of attention, capable of shielding themselves from any distraction, but the state of flow (the intensive focusing of the mind described For the psychologist Mihály (Csíkszentmihályi) it is today easier to find in the gym than in the classrooms. The work culture, criticized in school, finds a comfortable refuge in the fitness. ANDOur students suspect that effort is a variable without academic consequences and are more interested in finishing their work quickly than in completing it flawlessly. As the school becomes more permissive, students are less likely to face demanding challenges. What they demand from the coach, we deny to the teacher.
Attention has been defined as the ability to pay attention to something in order to acquire knowledge. It is a voluntary, effortful, and continuous focus on the object of knowledge. That is, a planned resistance to distraction, which is always lurking, waiting for a gap in our will to allow it to take control of our mind. It doesn't take long for it to find one. If, thanks to effortful attention, we manage to master driving a car, when mastery becomes routine (which is attention converted into a behavioral pattern), our mind, freed from the stress of learning, becomes easy prey to distraction. We become distracted when the cognitive load of a learning process is zero, because then it is trivially easy, and when it is too high, because excessive effort tires us out.
Attention is less natural than distraction. What the Anglo-Saxons call wandering mind (the wandering mind) comes standard with us, while the attention muscle has to be earned. We've all found ourselves distracted in situations where we needed to remain alert.
Inevitable distraction is also often the indispensable ingredient of creativity. We've all discovered what we were striving for just when we gave up the search and moved on to something else. It's not at all unusual that it's by being lazy, by letting our imaginations open to the free play of its images, that we find the answer our will was unable to grasp.
This is not a eulogy to the lazy, but to a well-deserved rest.
In conclusion: a student who wanders mentally isn't necessarily a bad student, nor does he necessarily have a boring teacher. Sometimes the source of his distraction is a teacher rich in resources and examples. Now we don't remember either the question or the problem. Without feedback, creativity is sterile. Attention, understood as the ability to return, is the new IQ (intelligence quotient).
To make the capacity for return possible, we must find an internal principle of authority that allows us to organize our experiences. This should be the central objective of education. It makes no pedagogical sense to encourage a variety of experiences and forget about their organization. To embrace this principle, a sophisticated linguistic culture is essential, allowing us to use verbal tenses to think about the possible, transcending the present and guiding experience toward the idea. In this regard, writing is a very valuable resource, because it is not just a means of transmitting ideas. It is, above all, a means of having it, and there is no substitute for this type of discovery. Let us remember that the humanist way of educating attention has not been pharmaceutical, but rather slow reading, which sows the soul with words and allows us to think about what we read. Let us remember this well because today, many young people arrive at university—even at elite universities—with great difficulty reading books.
