The concept of attention was once admired as “an important preliminary problem of all education” (Herbart) and then hidden behind the progressivist idea of education. It has gradually again become a focus of interest, despite, or even because of, the difficulties in maintaining stable attention within our technological environment. In the traditional philosophical conceptualization of attention, the dichotomous scheme of “sensualistic vs. voluntaristic” prevailed, but such a dichotomous scheme tended to be eschewed in the field of education. The emergence of a specific educational scheme of attention that has persisted until today is illustrated by means of the film-educational discussion as it developed in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s. There appeared the passive-automatic aspect of attention as a problem that must be addressed in the field of education. The domain of emotion became a significant objective of education in order to break through the passive-automatic attention and to reach the “real life” of each student. The concept of attention began to serve as a mechanism to intensify educational interventions.