Sorry for the silence – I have been in a not-unpleasant stupor since getting back to Toronto and home and my usual life. It’s been lovely, but I have not typed more than nine words till now.

I just wanted to share this excerpt from an older (Feb. 11, 2022) Ezra Klein Show. Ezra interviews Johann Hari, whose Lost Connections book about loneliness I really enjoyed, and whose new book Stolen Focus is about attention. Towards the end of the interview he describes school as a perfect machine for ruining attention. I share the text from the transcript here.

Ezra Klein: So you said something interesting, which is that if you wanted to design an education system to wreck people’s attention, you would design this one. How so, and as my final question before books to you, what would the alternative look like?

Johann Hari: So your ability to pay attention is intimately tied to the meaning you find in the thing you’re looking at. If you don’t find something meaningful, your attention will slip and slide off of it. As Professor Roy Baumeister said to me, a frog evolved to pay more attention to a fly than it does to a stone because the fly is meaningful to the frog and the stone is not, and what we’ve done is we’ve rebuilt our school system. We have stripped learning of meaning.

There was never a golden age, but we’ve made it even more about rote learning and completely meaningless tests. So I think we could really redesign the education system to infuse it with meaning. And I’ve seen places that did it. To give you an example, there’s a place called the Evangelista Shula’s Centrum in Berlin, a wonderful place I went to. What they do is at the start of each term, every class of kids chooses something they want to understand. So when I went there, the class I went into said they wanted to learn “Could humans live on the moon?”, and almost all of their lessons are then built around exploring different aspects of this question. The history class is about, okay, what’s the history of people going to the moon? The geography is like, well what could grow on the moon? The math is: okay, how do we design a rocket? You can see how that infuses education with meaning, and you could see how much better the kids attention was. So the school thing is huge.

I think there’s an even bigger element in relation to childhood. There’s a transformation in childhood. I almost think if you and I could go back in time and bring our great grandparents into the present, I think this is probably the change that would be most bizarre and alienating to them of all the changes that have occurred that are affecting our attention. So, I tell this story in the book through one of the great heroes that I met, a woman called Lenore Skenazy.

Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s and from when she was five years old, Lenore would walk out of her house and walked to school on her own. It was about 15 minutes away. When school ended, Lenore would leave and just wander around the neighborhood freely on her own. She would play games with the other kids that the kids would spontaneously organized, They’d run around and she would go home when she was hungry. That was how all childhood was essentially in the world at that point, with very few exceptions: Children played freely with other children without adult supervision. For most of time this was crucial for them. By the time Lenore was a parent in the 1990s, that had ended: she was expected to walk her kids to school, wait and watch them go through the door – even when they got pretty old – and to be there waiting at the gate to collect them at the end of the day. By 2003, only 10% of any American children ever played outdoors. So, essentially childhood became something that happened either behind closed doors or under tight adult supervision.

And it turns out there are loads of things in this enormous and unprecedented transformation in childhood that are important for attention. One, exercise. Kids who run around can play attention much better. The evidence for this is overwhelming. One of the single best things you can do for kids who can’t pay attention is let them go and run around. We have stopped that right, even before Covid, we stopped that and we imprisoned our children. In fact, the only place where our kids get to feel they’re roaming around at the moment is on Fortnite and on World of Warcraft – we can hardly be surprised that they become so obsessed with them. There are lots of other changes. Children learn when they play freely; what’s called intrinsic motivation. They discover meaning; this is absolutely essential for attention. Children learn through play, how to deploy attention – and it has to be free play. Just like processed food isn’t like food, supervised play where adults are telling kids what to do doesn’t give them the benefits of free play. So the reason Eleanor is the hero, one of the heroes of Stolen Focuses, not because she had this experience, but because of what she did with it. So Lenore was horrified by this change, right?

She could see that it was really harmful. And at first she tried to just persuade individual parents to let their kids play outside. She would often say to them, “What’s something you did when you were a kid that you really loved, that you don’t allow your own children to do?” And people’s eyes would light up. They talk about going into the woods, playing marbles, whatever it might be. But she realized, look, if you just try and persuade individuals, it doesn’t work. If you’re the only parent who sends your child out, they get frightened. You look crazy. In fact, often people call the police. So it just, it doesn’t work. So Eleanor now runs a group called Let Grow. And I really urge every parent grandparent listening to go to Let Grow dot org, and what they do is they go the whole schools and whole communities and persuade them to restore childhood together to let kids go out together on their own.

And I think of all the conversations I had with the book. I had so many moving conversations. I think the most moving was with a 14-year-old boy on Long Island. So I went to one of their Let Grow projects in Long Island And there was a 14-year-old boy. To give a sense of him, he was a big strapping 14-year-old, was bigger than me. His parents wouldn’t even let him go jogging around the block. I asked him why and he said, “My parents are frightened of all these kidnappings.” To give you a sense of this town, it’s a place where the French bakery is across the street from the olive oil store. His parents and him had a level of fear that would be appropriate if he lived in Medellin at the height of Pablo Escobar’s terror. Then Let Grow came along and he started to play outside his house, and he started to meet up with his friends. And what they’ve done just before I met him was they’d gone into the woods, and they built a fort as he talked. It was like watching a child come to life.

The joy of realizing he could do things, that he didn’t have to be constantly staring at screens, that he could go out into the world and explore it. Lenore was with me that day, and I remember when he left, she said think about all of human history. Young people throughout our history had to go out and explore. They had to map the territory they had to hunt. They had to find things. And then in one generation we took all that away and it had all sorts of stunting and warping effects on them, from their attention to their bodies. And that boy, given a little bit of freedom, what did he do? He went into the woods and he built a fort because this is so deep in us, this is such a deep human need. So the last quarter of the book is about children, because if we don't deal with kids’ attention, if they don’t form it when they’re young, they’re going to really struggle to develop it as they’re older, and this deadening school system and this home imprisonment makes them much easier prey for the invasive tech that we’ve alluded to.

That’s all for now. Hope you’re doing well. If you like this, please share it. We hope for a wide conversation here.

Cheers,

jep