Attention deficit and the development of child science in the Netherlands c. 1955-1985

Children’s attentiveness is a persistent instructional issue and plays an important role in the academic success or failure of students. In current day US pedagogical discourse attentiveness is often conceptualized in terms of ‘engagement,’ ‘time-ontask’ or ‘attention span,’ all of which map onto characteristics of the ‘good student’ and (unsurprisingly) then positively correlate to academic achievement. However, similar to the other chapters in this volume, one of the underlying premises of this chapter is that alongside this technicist approach and the understandings of human attention that we get from developmental psychology and the recent advances associated with brain-based research, we need historical scholarship on the various ways that human attentiveness and its opposites have figured as the targets of philosophical, scientific and pedagogical scrutiny across time.