Learning to “Code”

It was once common to suggest people who lose their blue-collar jobs should “learn to code.” This is no longer very good advice, if it ever was, since coding is now something you should definitely not learn if you want to keep up with progress. (AI tells me that the number of jobs for programmers has declined by 27.5 percent since AI came along.) But “learn to code” remains a pretty good metaphor for what we faculty will have to do if we want to keep doing our jobs. Higher ed is a broken thing, and if we’re going to do meaningful work in the ruins—and help to rebuild them—we need to develop some very different skills. 

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. 

Much of the way we teach is based on assumptions about students that no longer hold. I don’t just mean that we’ve taken for granted that their schooling will have taught them basic skills and knowledge on which we can build, though that’s also an assumption we can no longer make. I mean that we’ve taken for granted that their schooling and upbringing won’t have actively prevented them from developing skills far more fundamental than the ability to read, write, and calculate. What has been taken from them by the school-issued laptops and parent-issued smartphones is not the ability to read or write or calculate; it’s the basic human capacity to attend to the world around them for a reasonable length of time (they don’t have to be zen masters) before getting distracted by something else. These are two very different things: an illiterate hunter-gatherer of a few millennia ago had much greater ability to pay attention than a literate college student in the 21st century. In that respect, the hunter-gatherer was probably more “college material” than the college student. 

We faculty must now learn how to teach attention itself. 

What do we do when everything about our teaching is built on the assumption that our students have this basic capacity for sustained attention, and that capacity disappears, or is radically diminished, almost overnight? The question suggests its own answer. Education writer Andrew Cantarutti puts it well: “attention must become curriculum.” Instead of assuming that our students have any attention to give to our teaching, we faculty must now learn how to teach attention itself. 

Cantarutti is addressing the collapse of attention spans in K-12 education, but his thesis is obviously applicable to colleges and universities, if only because most of our students will have gone through the K-12 system (those few that haven’t, by the way, are usually less incapacitated). Yet I think it will be harder for college professors to imagine attention as their curriculum than it will be for K-12 teachers. Or maybe I should speak for myself, since I’m probably more old-fashioned than a lot of my colleagues. My “curriculum” is basically a list of books (and no textbooks, if I can help it). My idea of “pedagogy” is more or less to (1) read books with students, and (2) talk about books with students, who will then (3) write about books.

That’s the kind of teaching I think people should be capable of handling if they’re going to go to college. I certainly don’t believe in “lesson planning”; this isn’t middle school. I believe in being so immersed in my subject that I can speak about it clearly and enthusiastically without much more planning than a few notes on a proverbial napkin. Or, if you like, I spent about 13 years planning every lecture I now give. This is how my own professors taught, it’s how they were taught, and in my mind, it’s just how college is supposed to be. Read stuff, talk about stuff, write about stuff. Everything else is just a gimmick.

My idea of “pedagogy” is more or less to (1) read books with students, and (2) talk about books with students, who will then (3) write about books.

But my old-fashioned approach puts me at a serious disadvantage when it comes to imagining attention as curriculum. Because of how I teach, I depend even more than most on the assumption that my students can pay attention. Faculty who use PowerPoint, for example, can at least use snazzy visuals to snag a few seconds of fleeting focus from their doomscrolling students. I don’t use PowerPoint because I think PowerPoint itself is a distraction. 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. Coding sounds like gimmickry.

We assumed that students came to college with a basic capacity for attention, but maybe they simply came without a smartphone. But there are stages of grief, and I’m starting to see myself moving along toward something like acceptance—and even, perhaps, to a sense that this crisis may indeed be the opportunity that every act of “creative destruction” is supposed to be. What the movers and breakers have done to our students’ minds (and to ours! I’m certainly not unaffected by my iPhone) is inexcusable. But there is something to be gained when we are forced to be more intentional about what we have so far taken for granted. What is attention, after all? Maybe we never really knew, because all it really was was the absence of the distractions that have now broken it. We assumed that students came to college with a basic capacity for attention, but maybe they simply came without a smartphone. Maybe the “attention economy,” by so vividly contrasting attention to distraction, is a provocation that can inspire us to build an even more robust “attentional commons” within our institutions than the one we inherited and have now lost. Maybe we can “build back better” by rebuilding the foundations on which the very possibility of education has always rested. Maybe progress is possible. 

A few semesters ago, I offered a new summer course called “Freedom and Technology.” There were the usual readings, writing assignments, and discussions, but the centerpiece of the course was the residential component. For the duration (about a month), students were required to live together in a “tech-free dorm.” “Tech-free” meant, at a minimum, no smartphones. But the students themselves decided to go further and live without screens of any kind. No laptops, no TVs, no video games, no nothing. Every day they came into class and talked about how great it was, how many other interesting things they had time for. One student spent a lot of time with the mandolin he’d always wanted to get better at, and on weekends traveled to bluegrass festivals to jam with other amateurs. At the end, I asked them all whether it had been difficult. They said it had been much easier than they thought. They said it quickly felt natural, and that they didn’t miss any of the things they’d given up. So yes: progress is possible.  

Yet I still feel at a loss. Learning to code is hard. It’s hard to go back to the beginning; to be a novice instead of an expert; to ask for advice; to try things out and be awkward instead of impressive; to admit that what I’m doing is not what’s needed, even if it’s what I think I’m supposed to be doing. I suspect it will feel like this for quite a while. But after all, we do adapt. 

Adam Smith is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Dubuque and Associate Editor at Front Porch Republic.