To break down your mentality, personality and identity as well as your natural state of being. I have already given thought to the general conditioning via the school system in Institutionalised, and many have noticed it as a central point of ‘information’ for many throughout their childhoods. Making sure we are all ‘reading from the same page’ and all that.

But when thinking of the aspect of attention spans, and how I felt that children shouldn’t be stuck in a building all day surrounded by people they essentially aren’t familiar with on a personal level, I realised something else. That rather than trying to increase attention spans at all, it seemed more of a disruptor of them. This is mostly from a secondary school point of view, and was given thought again as I mulled over how ADHD came to be. Wondering again if it’s environmental, medical, or psychological based on the other options. And I thought of how hard it was to concentrate at school, and then mentally ran through what it was that created a disturbance.

The weekly planner. The list of all the classes, all the subjects and time slots, gearing you up for your week ahead, filling your head with all that had been scheduled for you, for you to adhere to and be ‘subjected’ to. Now, it may well be that some people are the type to be heavily distracted by thoughts of all the things you are going to do, and there are those who prefer to think about what they are doing, or both. But it’s a one size fits all program, where if you don’t fit, they attempt to ‘shave off the edges’ to make it so. Square peg and round hole springs to mind. But the point being, many people aren’t good at organising, or planning ahead or wanting to even think about the next day let alone next week, deadlines, exams, or just continuous structure someone else decided.

And is it just possible, that by forcing people to have one-hour lessons (ish), constantly chopping and changing in one day, never being able to get into anything properly, different teachers, subjects, ideas and always on the clock, this has a lasting effect. Watching and waiting for your allotted break time, lesson time, lunchtime, home time. Lots of time and the concept of it being used to control people and their mindsets. Never able to get into a subject, because it’s time to move on, cutting that thought process dead in the water, expecting you to just pick it up again when they say so. Switching to the next potentially complex subject, but after moving you to another room, mingling with people and being distracted even further by a hint of life, then it’s quashed again so you can ‘learn’. But it seems that what we were to be learning, was in fact to have a short attention span, and to be able to work to schedules and deadlines, to organise ourselves for that lifetime of employment, and of course to increase our capacity for multiple subjects of thought at once. Perhaps to prime us for the onslaught of propaganda and technology that was come, making sure we are ‘trained’ for maximum input.

Or it was simply a consequence of that environment, my article A Consequence, or a Cause? would be relevant here. Because I do wonder how much of our behaviour as individuals and in a group, is natural, conditioned or as a side-effect of what we are subjected to as a routine within what they have called society. And as we are forced to spend many, many years of our lives in the system, one can’t but help to realise it has an effect, whether it be seen as a good one or bad one is down to the individual. Because aside from the conditioning purpose they are there for, it seems they have a side game running, of an odd set up where psychological issues are created, observed and medicated. And now we have the schools changing it up a gear, to saturate and groom the new generations with confusion and fear while the societal landscape is being re-arranged around us all. As it seems has happened before…

(c) K Wicks