This is the third piece in a six-part series on attention as curriculum. Parts 1 and 2, “Attention Is Not Free” and “Too Much, Too Soon,” established what Attentional Literacy is and when each part of it should be taught. This piece turns to what becomes possible when we direct our attention deliberately. For information about the full series, you can learn more here: “Attention, Unfinished.”
The title of this piece comes from Mary Oliver’s “Sometimes”. If I told you that the poem pairs a field of sunflowers basking in the still heat of summer with the violence of an electrical storm marauding across the horizon, or that it names the uneasy, ineffable, and conspicuous relationship between God and death, you might assume that the poet flings her readers about with cruel disregard.
But no. In her clean and easy way, Oliver reminds us that these things are our common inheritance — the universal spectrum of human experience. They are our nature, and she gestures, humbly, toward their beauty. She tells us that to perceive the breadth of this gift, we must only “Pay attention,” and if we do, we will surely “Be astonished.”
So what does it actually take to train our attention toward something we choose, rather than merely defend against its capture? Every tradition that has taken attention seriously has answered that question the same way: not by leaving it undirected, but by choosing, deliberately, what it should be for.
When I announced this series, I wrote that attention is “a practice with its own long tradition, in prayer, in meditation, in boredom embraced rather than escaped.” In response, one of The Walled Garden’s readers pointed out: “Every one of those traditions trained attention toward an object — God, liberation, the world as given — and the aiming did as much formative work as the practicing.”
That’s right. Every serious tradition asks that we direct our attention toward something.
Take Buddhism as an example, because it’s a tradition often misunderstood to be without an obvious aim, so let’s clear that up. Buddhism is not what happens on your favourite “mindfulness” app, nor is it the corporate breathing exercise you did in the office last Wednesday, and it’s certainly not a form of generic stress relief. These are commercialized reductions of a complex, 2,500-year-old tradition deserving of far more respect.
No, Buddhism is none of those things, but it does have an explicit aim. The fifth-century scholar-monk Buddhaghosa wrote the Visuddhimagga, taken to be one of the principal texts on the subject of meditation. In it, he catalogues forty different meditation objects used to develop calm concentration. These range from bodily phenomena, like breathing, to intentionally cultivated emotions, like sympathetic joy over someone else’s success. To suit each practitioner’s temperament, one of these meditation objects is assigned to them by a teacher.
But focusing on one’s breath is only the proximate object. Regardless of what you’re assigned, Buddhism has a universal, non-negotiable aim: liberation from suffering.
Flexible object. Fixed aim.
Before going any further, I want to make one thing absolutely clear: Attentional Literacy in schools doesn’t need to be about reaching toward something as grand as liberation, however you define the term. But having an aim, it turns out, is not optional. Sometimes, it’s just invisible.
Not every aim gets declared. Some just get followed.
The investor Charlie Munger had a line for this: “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” Tristan Harris has spent years tracking what that principle produces in social media platforms built to hold your attention. The incentive, derived from time on screen, is profit. Every design choice, from Snapchat’s streaks to YouTube’s autoplay, is downstream of it.
Schools don’t always have the same clarity. Nobody in Silicon Valley forgot to decide what the aim was; they know exactly what they’re optimizing for. A school’s aim may not be hidden, but we often fail to articulate it confidently, and competing interests take over as a result.
When a teacher uses Kahoot to end a lesson, what’s the aim? When a library is converted into a maker space, what’s the aim? When the varsity soccer programme gets its own Instagram account, what’s the aim?
Engagement. Relevance. Approval. Nobody chose these deliberately. They accumulated by default.
So here’s the real question: What happens when an aim isn’t left to default? What happens when it’s declared and built into everything around it?
In The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, historian Jamie Kreiner has an answer. She spent years studying the lives of Christian monks and nuns from Ireland to Mesopotamia, roughly 300 to 900 CE, and what she found unsettles the classic image of monks as serene masters of their own minds. They weren’t. Distraction, to them, was a matter of life and death. Their word for the danger of an untethered mind was acedia — a kind of spiritual paralysis that could leave a monk unable to summon the will to pray, work, or do much of anything else. A wandering mind was more than a lapse in productivity; it was threatening to the whole purpose of a monk’s life.
So they built accordingly. They devised regimented schedules, leaving little to chance. Monks trained themselves in fasting, in silence, and in physical isolation. Some even went to unfathomable extremes — apparently it’s possible to sleep standing up. And they watched each other, ensuring that their brothers’ attention didn’t drift away from their shared mission, their common aim: to hold God in mind, without interruption, for a lifetime.
“The aiming did as much formative work as the practicing.” You can see what an aim, taken seriously enough, is capable of producing: entire ecologies of practice, entire communities, entirely new ways of being. But notice what the monks did that tech platforms never do. Silicon Valley optimizes for an incentive it inherited, not one it chose. Profit-from-attention came from the market; their engineers are tasked with chasing it. The monks chose their object first, then built around it.
That’s an important distinction. Both build with enormous care, but only one of them selected its aim deliberately.
Obviously, no school subject would, or should, ask for this from a child. A history class doesn’t need a monk’s discipline because history class isn’t reaching for a monk’s object. The takeaway here is that an aim, once identified, can organize everything around it. If we leave it unnamed, something fills the space anyway, but that something might not be in our kids’ best interest.
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote: “The all-too-common phrase heard in classrooms around the world, ‘Pay attention,’ reduces this most important gift to a servant of compliance…” That reduction — a command to attend without an object beyond the command itself — creates an aim by default. In most classrooms, the default aim is order, not the subject of study.
But calling on students to pull out their phones so that they can scan a QR code in order to participate in a Mentimeter poll isn’t much better. That dynamic defaults to stimulation and superficial engagement.
None of this is an argument for turning classrooms into chapels, or subjects into creeds. I referenced monks and meditation manuals in this piece because they offer the best evidence that attention requires an object, pursued on purpose. That’s a structural fact about how trained attention works. It’s not a case for importing any particular theology, methodology, or stakes into a public school. A history class doesn’t need doctrine. But it does need something.
So what should that something be? I don’t think one size fits all, but here are some possibilities to get you thinking:
A history class might aim at the ability to recognize and understand perspective: reading the numbered treaties that shape western Canada, where the written English text recorded a transfer of land, while the oral tradition kept by the First Nations understood a promise to share it.
A mathematics class might aim at logic: the square root of two can’t be written as a fraction — a conclusion very upsetting to the ancient Greeks who first noticed the conundrum.
A literature class might aim at empathy: tracing the creature’s own account, in Frankenstein, of exactly how repeated rejection turned him toward violence — understanding the rationale without excusing the result.
Imagine if your teacher, when you entered the room, said in no uncertain terms that your job wasn’t just to “pay attention,” but to pay attention to the competing perspectives that various players hold in this story, to what logic won’t let you deny, no matter how wrong it feels, to why a character might do something you yourself would never do. Not just a series of events, numbers, or imagined characters, but something clear to aim toward: a purpose overtly articulated.
Our curricula are full of content and competencies. What they lack is an answer to why. A student can satisfy every standard in a history class, rattling off facts about what happened where and when, without the ability to tell you why she should care. She can pass every competency check in math without knowing why the steps are true, or how one forces the next.
When the aim goes unnamed, our students default to the system’s incentives. Their aim becomes compliance — achievement, competition, a grade. An aim revealed by default requires no reflection, no consideration, and no critical thought.
What a student actually needs — if paying attention is going to mean more than sitting still — is something beyond a checklist. They need teachers who are willing to say, out loud, what their classroom is for. Not superficial “engagement.” Not twenty-first-century “relevance.” Something a teacher believes is worth attending to, made clear enough for a fourteen-year-old to understand.
Which is where Mary Oliver’s instructions finish. She tells us to “Pay attention,” and “Be astonished.” But there’s a third and final line in that stanza:
“Tell about it.”
Underneath all of the grades and the lesson plans, that’s what teaching really is. Someone who has paid close enough attention to a subject long enough to be regularly and consistently astonished, standing in front of a room full of kids, telling them about it. Not just covering it, or delivering it, but making the case for why it deserves their attention.
So do your students a favour: name the aim. When you do, you open up the possibility for them to be astonished. Our disciplines outlive us because they get passed from one astonished person to the next. One day, your students might “tell about it” too.
If this piece resonated, share it with educators, administrators, and parents in your network. These conversations grow stronger with more voices, and The Walled Garden grows through exactly this kind of conversation.
Part 4, “Nobody Taught the Teachers,” will ask what teachers need in order to cultivate their students’ attention. To get a full sense of the series, “Attention, Unfinished” lays out all six parts.
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