One of the most central educational issues is the one concerning attention. The concept of attention is vast and it can be connected to specific neurological processes in the brain (Parasuraman, 2000), a complex of cognitively challenging activities (Mole, 2011), a set of wanted or expected behaviors in specific social contexts (Mole, 2011), or different qualitative and purposeful relations between a person and the surrounding world (Varela, Thomson & Rosch 2003; Mole 2011, Arvidsson, 2000). Due to current neo-liberal trends within western educational institutions, where measurability, standardization and marketization are key-terms (Biesta, 2014), and the increasing psychologization/individualization of the young generation (Säfström, 2012; Stiegler, 2010; Pierce, 2013), it seems as if notions of education as a relational practice of intergenerational and interpersonal communication are given less and less operational space. Instead of letting attention be a central element in processes of learning, socialization and the formation of unique subjects, attention has become an inherent capacity of the student, the lacking of which is explained pathologically and compensated for medically (Pierce, 2013; Ljungdahl, 2016).

In this paper I explore some qualitative aspects of the attending and attentive subjects, by drawing on the writings of Simone Weil and Michel Foucault.

Both Weil and Foucault have in different ways acknowledged the important relation between attention and the self. While Weil develops a spiritual form of attention, an attention which can be trained in any form of serious studying, aiming at dissolving the illusion of the self (and maybe the self in itself), Foucault understands attention as an important aspect in the Greek notion of the care of the self, which was developed outside of and due to the limitations of pedagogy aiming at a self-attentive self-formation. Both notions of attention thus have a kind of anti-educational dimension. In line with Foucault it is anti-institutional and in line with Weil, it is non-formative. Despite this, their respective perspectives do inform educational thinking and practice in interesting ways, which will be dealt with in the final section of the paper. The care of the self, as examined by Foucault is first and foremost a spiritual activity in that it addresses and forms a certain attentive subject, through attitudes, dispositions and values concerning life in its generality. It is also a spiritual activity that both centers on and centers the self as an embodied organism of Culture. Simone Weil has also a spiritual approach to the self, but an approach closely linked to the Christian goal of renouncing the self.  While Foucault is interested in the formation of the self, Weil is aiming toward a dissolution of the self. By doing that Weil rather promotes practices for taking care of the not-self. This un-selfing (c.f. Olson, 2015) is characterized by an uninterested relation to the world, through the attainment of grace. Weil, like Foucault, sought for a reexamination of Greek culture which did not make it a humanistic contrast to the supernaturalist Christianity (Finch, 1999). As Foucault showed, there was in Greek culture a spiritual side and according to Finch (1999), the very idea of the cultural was to the Greeks a mediation between the human and the divine, whereas the social was the home of the collective ego (Finch, 1999, p.18). Whereas Foucault investigates the care of the self as an unfolding of subjectivity due to the close attention to the self, Weil’s self has to resist any form of identifying good values to the self, because this would only have these values destroyed.

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