Futures Burgled in the Dead of Night: Education in an Age of Stolen Attention

The United Nations proclaimed the 24th of January as the International Day of Education to recognise education as a human right, a public good, and a shared responsibility. In South Africa, this is a right enshrined in the Constitution and one which is provided for by section 29 for all children. Rights, however, are not always evenly distributed in many societies – and the right to education is one often dispensed and experienced differently based on people’s race, class, gender, dis(ability), language, geography and political (in)stability. As such, the promises of reduced poverty, improved health outcomes, strengthened democracies become the preserve of well-governed countries and the oligarchs of such a country. This year, the theme “The power of youth in co-creating education” operates on the assumption that all youths in the world have the agency to co-create, ignoring the immense threats to such a possibility, chief among them being the systemic intellectual atrophication and colonisation of children’s attention spans at the hands (and screens) of BigTech companies determining for the world what public goods should be.

According to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), 81% of Grade 4 pupils in South Africa cannot read for meaning in any language. While this suggests that Early Childhood Development and Foundation Phase (Grades R-3) learning outcomes reflect poor or inappropriate pedagogical approaches, there are other structural issues that cannot be extricated from the phenomenon. Similarly, while it may be easy to blame parents for not playing the active role they should be playing in inculcating and harnessing critical skills in their children, there are other factors related to how they are situated in the economy that may prevent them from being partners of their children’s learning. These include apartheid spatial-related remnants such as them spending long hours commuting to and from work via public transport and coming home to do housework such as cooking and cleaning. It could also be a result of unemployment trauma leading to substance abuse, the byproduct of which would be chronic child neglect in many instances.

The psychological and educational integrity of children in the world is systemically being contested and colonised by the uptake of generative artificial intelligence which relies on large language models (LLMs). While much debate is had about its ethical use in education institutions and in assessments, the interception in what should be slow and steady learning is leading to the atrophication of children’s intellectual capabilities and development journeys. Imagine a learner who – only two-decades ago – would have needed to visit a library, take out at least 3 books or encyclopedia, read through reams of information before proceeding to synthesise and produce a good piece of academic work now having all such activity left to machines that are capable of error, lack empathy and use up more water and electricity than a well-nurtured brain would ever use to advance the world more sustainably.

The extractive nature of algorithms baying for everyone’s attention affects parents of school-going children too. A mother or father who has come home from work and experiences executive freeze, whereby the nervous system retreats and the body signals ‘Stop. This is too much.’ During this state, researchers report that doomscrolling may become a coping mechanism – something that the parents may fall victim to whilst they gather the strength to undertake subsequent tasks which may exclude actively helping children with their homework.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that educational outcomes rest on the level of education that parents have, the number of resources available at home and the social capital generated and transmitted within the family. While the internet has been a blessing in increasing access to resources that would only have existed in libraries and knowledge-holding institutions, it has since become a curse as most citizens making use of LLMs do not have alternative resources to critically question the veracity of information produced as a result of a prompt. When critical thinking skills are outsourced in this way, users, both children and parents, become vulnerable to disinformation. Such disinformation smudges all possibility of an electorate and children who will be able to make critical assessments of how elites behave and manufacture consent even using these technologies.

South Africa typically plans prospectively for 30 years and fewer. It will not be meeting most of the targets it set for itself through the National Development Plan whose vision was meant to create a better life for all by 2030. An emerging superpower in the world, China, typically plans for 100 years and more and is probably on path to achieving its goals for this century as a country that has achieved an average GDP growth of roughly 5–6% sustained over a decade — a rate most middle-income democracies would consider miraculous. TikTok, a social media platform which was born in the country, is a major player in the attention economy in how it has gripped both young and old with an uptake of an estimated 1.6 billion active users.

Statistics available on DATA Reportal indicate that South Africa’s usership of TikTok as of late 2025 is around 29 million, all of whom are 18 years and older. This number marks a significant increase from an estimated 17.5 million in the previous year. This means the colonisation of attention spans is aggressive for those living in South Africa and poses a major risk for a country whose main goal should, among others, be to re-industrialise so as to create more jobs and increase the size of the economy. A voting class whose atrophication is led by subscription to platforms like TikTok is unlikely, then, to not be too distracted from safeguarding education from being a site and factory of intellectual atrophication.

Young minds being force-fed short form content as knowledge and beneficial is widely suspected to drive attention-related disorders such as Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. The absence of policy interventions to attend to the relationship between emergent technologies and these mental health disorders poses a threat to the sustainable well-being of children across the board, particularly countries like South Africa. Comparatively, French, Denmark, and Italy have banned the presence of cellphones at primary and secondary schools, and other European countries have put serious restrictions. This begs the question then: which children, between those of the Global North and Global South would then be better suited to co-creating education in light of this year’s International Day of Education’s theme? It is clear that the lack of political will among those in the Global South and South Africa in particular are in the business of neglecting young people’s intellectual and creative well-being.

Education psychologists and occupational therapists are not based at every school to measure the impact and engage schools on how school policies can better take care of children’s intellectual and creative well-being in light of new technologies. For example, one long-term threat facing the South African Department of Basic Education is that every school may need to be equipped to accept that a majority of children will qualify as learners with special educational needs (LSEN). Equally, schools that have historically been exclusionary, particularly Model C schools, may be quick to mask racism and other forms of bigotry by turning away learners who present as neurodiverse or conducting witch-hunts on underperforming learners who learn in non-hegemonic ways. This could reverse some of the gains of social justice that have been made in post-apartheid inclusive education policy.

Overcrowded schools where the teacher-pupil ratio can be as high as 1 to 60 in many South African schools makes it impossible for co-creation in education as per the International Day of Education’s theme. This is because there is administrative strain for teachers who have to deliver lessons, mark strenuous volumes of assessments, ensure mark schedules are completed timeously and fight to finish the syllabus on time. If AI were used to lessen the assessment load and the machines were responsible for marking to reduce the administrative load, the social distance between teachers and learners would widen and lead to more atrophication of the intellectual work it takes to adjudicate learner performance carefully. The room to co-create and imagine interactive learning and shift from what Paulo Freire would have described as the banking system of education where teachers impart knowledge in ways that assume children are intellectually vacant and without life experience from which to draw and co-construct their own knowledge.

A number of years ago, Professor Nomalanga Mkhize – who was a participant at the A.C Jordan Conference hosted by the UCT Centre of African Studies – decried “‘…the systemic de-aggrarianisation of the black child’s imagination”, not knowing that generative AI would descend among the youth to further stunt each country’s learning and developmental objectives.

One MIT study led by Nataliya Kosmyna showed reduced brain activity among a group of students who relied on AI to write essays. What should alarm many about studies like this is not just that students are experiencing eroded intellectual capability and incurring cognitive debt, but that the absence of power or compromised access to energy would not yield imaginative problem-solving among future generations. In other words, if AI began to use much more electricity to operate and energy insecurity were a future threat, children and adults would not know how to traverse the dark because generative AI is already creating an environment of intellectual darkness.

The international and national task around education should be about erecting systemic protections against the intellectual atrophication of youths — not to shield them from the world, but to ensure they are equipped to meet it with discernment, imagination and agency.

Siphokuhle Mathe is the Founder and CEO of Mathesian Academy, an education platform focused on literacy, numeracy and critical thinking. His work sits at the intersection of education, technology, policy and social justice, and explores how power, attention and inequality shape learning outcomes in the Global South.