Attention as a prerequisite subject

Gloria Mark started with a stopwatch. In 2004, this researcher at the University of California, Irvine, would sit behind office workers and note down, second by second, how long they remained on a single screen before jumping to another. The average came out to two and a half minutes. When she repeated the study in 2012, this time with tracking software, the figure had fallen to 75 seconds. In her most recent measurements, gathered in her book Attention Span (2023), the average hovers around 47 seconds, with a median of 40; other teams that have replicated the method obtain between 44 and 50. It is worth highlighting a detail that is almost always forgotten when quoting these numbers: Mark did not study adolescents. She studied adults. Us.

The temptation upon reading this is to turn it into a generational sermon, and that is precisely the reading that must be avoided. If the average capacity to remain on a task has been divided by three in twenty years, and it has happened to forty-year-old office workers just as much as to fourteen-year-old students, the explanation cannot be anyone's moral weakness. The explanation is industrial. On the other side of every screen work thousands of extraordinarily well-paid engineers whose job is to capture and retain human attention, because that is what their companies live on. It is a massive asymmetry of forces, and recognizing it changes the tone of the entire school conversation: the student who cannot concentrate is not a culprit to be scolded, but the weak party in an unequal struggle.

What the school sees from within

Gregorio Luri, who was a teacher before he was a philosopher, has been arguing for years that attention is "the new IQ": the ability that will best distinguish trajectories in the coming decades, precisely because it has become scarce. And he adds something decisive: attention is educated. It is not commanded—ordering a class to "pay attention!" is as effective as telling an insomniac to sleep—but it is stretched, like a muscle, with gradual exercise. A class that requires following a long argument, a text that does not yield its meaning on the first reading, a problem that demands staying with it longer than is comfortable: that is an attention gym, and the school is the last place in a kid's life where that gym exists.

The global education monitoring report that UNESCO dedicated to technology in 2023 carried a rather undiplomatic question in its title: a tool on whose terms? Its data justify the suspicion. Only 16% of countries guarantee the privacy of educational data by law; an analysis cited in the report found that 89 out of 100 educational technology products examined could monitor minors; and much of the evidence on the benefits of using technology in the classroom shows small to medium effects, frequently financed by whoever sells the product. UNESCO's conclusion is not prohibitionist: it is that technology should enter the classroom on the school's terms, not the provider's.

The scientific dispute, honestly told

Regarding the relationship between screens and adolescent well-being, there is an open academic debate, and this notebook prefers to tell it in full rather than choose the convenient headline. On one side, Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation (2024) that the arrival of the smartphone reconfigured childhood with severe psychological costs. On the other, researchers like Candice Odgers, who reviewed the book in Nature, and Andrew Przybylski, at Oxford, counter that the correlations found are small and that causality is far from being proven; in their view, the strong thesis is running ahead of the data. The dispute remains alive, and probably will be for years.

The interesting thing for a teaching staff is that they do not need to wait for the verdict. That it is harder to sustain a group's attention—and one's own—than it was fifteen years ago is a classroom reality that neither side disputes; Mark's data, measured in adults, support it without needing to weigh in on anyone's mental health. And the sensible school response is the same no matter who wins the debate: it does not depend on demonizing devices or assigning blame to families, a territory into which this notebook does not venture, but on deciding what experience of attention the school offers during its own hours.

Objects worthy of attention

Because attention is not trained in a vacuum. It is trained with objects that deserve it. A well-framed math problem that piques curiosity before requiring technique. A page that is reread because the second reading yields more than the first. Half an hour of silent work from which one emerges with something accomplished. The deep satisfaction of having finally understood something difficult, which no thirty-second video can provide because it requires precisely what the video does not demand. The school cannot compete with the entertainment industry in stimulus per second, and it does poorly when it tries; its advantage lies on the other board, that of depth, where it plays alone.

There remains the part we least like to look at. Gloria Mark's subjects were us, the adults. The teacher who wants students capable of paying attention teaches, above all, through their own way of being: their capacity to listen to an entire answer without looking at the screen, to sustain a long explanation with clear architecture, to read deeply and let it show. Attention is contagious, just as haste is contagious. And a fragmented faculty, saturated with platforms and notifications, transmits fragmentation no matter how many workshops on concentration they schedule.

That is why at Nomba Education we design teacher training as a return to long form: guided reading that makes room for whole books again, classes and conversations that demand—and reward—sustained attention, a community where thinking slowly is not a luxury but the method. Attention is the prerequisite subject to all others, and like all real subjects, it begins with the one who teaches it.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.