ABSTRACT
It is natural to assume that educators are looking for the best ways to engage students and to capture their attention. But, as many teachers know, attention is an elusive faculty that does not always respond well to coercion. Coercion may demand concentration but that is not quite the same. In order to address the role and limits of attention in education, some theorists have sought to recover the significance of silence or mindfulness in education. In this chapter I argue that it is not enough to see silence as a useful tool for managing learning, or even as an end in itself. Where silence is pedagogically deployed, or simply enforced, educators seek the refinement of attention. Religious traditions have long been in the business of the formation of attention. As society has become increasingly secular, and corporate advertising has become the lingua franca of the new attention economy, the scarce resources of attention are in danger of exploitation, and educators are struggling to find their role within this crowded marketplace. Of course religions too have engaged in their fair share of such exploitation, but arguably in a somewhat more self-conscious way. By contrast it is the putative neutrality of the attention economy that obscures assumptions around agency and freedom of choice, leading us to complacently believe that we are free to attend to one thing or another, a complacency that advertisers rely on in their seductions.
