Our education system has been undermined in numerous ways and among them is that many students have very poor attention spans. They can’t read books or concentrate on lectures. How are professors to react to that?

In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Adam Smith discusses this serious problem.

He writes:

By “learn to code,” I certainly don’t mean we need to bring a bunch of new apps and devices into our classrooms to “upgrade our pedagogy.” That’s a lot of what broke us. We can talk about the demographic cliff and administrative bloat, but all that could go away tomorrow, and the deeper problem would still be there. I’m talking about the problem with the students. A few years ago, we read about “the elite college kids who can’t read books.” A few months ago, it was “the film students who can no longer sit through films.” It’s reasonable to be skeptical of trend-spotting pieces about “the kids these days,” but the kids in my classes really can’t read books, and they really can’t sit through movies, and every professor I know says the same about their own students. The simple truth is that their attention spans have been wrecked, and they’re no longer capable of receiving what we faculty are currently capable of offering.

Smith’s indictment of American education is stark: It is now preventing young people from acquiring the abilities they need to learn. He agrees with others who have looked into this problem that “attention must be curriculum.”

Smith continues, “But if students can barely attend to slides on a screen, they certainly can’t just ‘read stuff and talk about it.’ So I’m forced to think about what it would look like for me to explicitly teach students how to do what they should already know how to do. And this is pretty much the equivalent of a factory worker ‘learning to code.’ I have no idea how to code, and I don’t want to learn to code. I resent the fact that I have to ‘adapt’ to the wreckage.”

Smith has put his finger on a problem that will only get worse.