You’ve no doubt heard of the Snowflake generation: originating on US college campuses, they are the students who melt at the slightest challenge, and need trigger warnings for any idea or text that might be unsettling.

There’s a new term around now, one that has been coined to describe an alarming trend in human thought processes: it has been reported that in 2008 there were studies showing that the average human attention span on a single topic was around 12 seconds. “By 2026 that has dropped to eight seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish”, as one article has put it.

The culprit of course is social media and the term Goldfish Generation is used to describe the generation who grew up as digital natives, Gen Z, who “average about 6.5 seconds of focused attention per social media post” and spend a huge amount of time on smart phones.

Professor Jonathan Haight in The Anxious Generation describes the “great rewiring” of childhood that is reshaping the brains of a generation: the switching, hopping, jumping from one post to another is removing what he calls “friction” from young minds. “Friction” is the ability to hold sustained attention when there are other competing distractions. Many studies are now supporting this view of a decline in human cognitive function generally.

So the title of Johann Hari’s recent best seller Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again says it all. Many of us need to be taught how to “pay attention” again.

Steiner schools have a huge contribution to make here, both in how we provide a training in attentive thinking to our students, and how we practice attention ourselves. The Main Lesson method is but one example of concentrated attention in focused learning that builds “friction” and is a powerful antidote to the distractions of social media for young people.

Rudolf Steiner himself had remarkable powers of concentration, and gave exercises in building attention. While it can sound like a soulless practice of just holding the mind on one topic, he emphasised again and again the greater joy that hard work and attention can bring. Here are a few words from the address he gave to the students of the first Waldorf school at their first Christmas assembly in 1919:

“You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then, my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. The other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end. But when we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops.”

With best wishes,

Andrew Hill
CEO
Steiner Education Australia