EN:

Much of the current available literature on leisure characterizes it as an additional consumer good: a derivative of capitalist society, featured as a commodity and, for the most part, an industry. This paper argues that recovering the concept of leisure from the ancients, with a contemporary focus on culture and the practice of living artfully, will help us create a new understanding of leisure that will break free from the reigning popular focus on “free time.” The concept of leisure (scholé) will here be set against an existential backdrop that will situate it entirely within the realm of education, to reveal important connections to what it means to be an educated self and to lead a flourishing collective life in the form of culture. This discussion will conclude with a portrait of the concept that will be of interest to democracy-oriented educators, as we set the groundwork for actualizing the concept in the practice and lives of teachers and students in today’s world.

EN:

In the pages to follow, I propose a meditation on the concept of study, its place in our contemporary scene, and its relation to the classical notion of leisure. In general terms, we can define leisure as an extreme disposition or state in which our relation to the world remains indeterminate in some way. In this sense, leisure favours a radical experience of the open and ungraspable characteristics of the human world. This is a nearly intolerable state. Reactions against it tend toward work, diversion, entertainment, or consumption. The hypothesis that I wish to explore in this essay, then, is the idea that study consists, in a singular and properly school-related manner, in inhabiting leisure, a condition which today deserves to be cultivated and protected. This idea of study is a way of being and dwelling in which the existence of a common world is in play and at stake.

EN:

The article is concerned with the difficulty of providing leisure today with a positive definition that goes beyond merely being a negation of work. I argue that the vague boundaries between work and leisure play into the hands of work – a highly praised activity that is dominant in today’s society. I argue that in such a situation, education as leisure and as good in itself is hard to conceive and sustain. First, I present the concept of leisure in ancient Greece (scholé) as time dedicated to autotelic activities – activities taken for their own good – a definition that remains paradigmatic despite its later impossibility. I then show that once work has transformed from hated to bearable to eventually understood as good from a moral perspective, the concept of leisure has also changed – so much so that its positive definition is no longer available to us. After showing how education is affected by the diffusion of the boundaries between work and leisure, I suggest three possible ways to counter this process: (1) focusing on leisure as resistance to the dominance of work, (2) appealing to the deep connection between leisure and religious worship, and (3) a radical rejection of the concept of “leisurely work” or any other kind of work that is presumed good in itself.

EN:

Philosophical discussions about leisure time often take place on an abstract level. But leisure time does not exist a priori to lived experience in concreate situations. Its existence, or the lack thereof, is often predicated on the material conditions of daily life. In this article the very real conditions of indebted life are the starting point for theoretical considerations on leisure time and education, and how education may or may not be an experience of leisure. Philosophers of education often leap to the emancipatory potential of conceptualizing education as a form of free time, before, or without, addressing the negations that stand in the way of this ideal becoming a reality. Conceptualizing education experience or schools as sites of leisure within the debt economy without first taking into consideration the ways in which debt negates leisure time leads to the production of education theories that only materialize into education realities on rare occasions. Thus, a central claim here is that education philosophers and practitioners must acknowledge the ways in which educational experiences are themselves conditioned, though not overdetermined, by the contemporary “debt economy.” Building on, with adaptations, theories of scholé, I aim to show the reader that despite the ways in which educational experience is shaped by debt, educational experience can suspend debt’s temporal force, providing momentary but much needed temporal respite from indebted life.

EN:

The binary work/leisure continues to be used to categorize many human activities, but falls short for ways of life in which a particular set of values undergirds all activities. This paper discusses regenerative forms of growing and harvesting food – in particular, permaculture and natural farming – as values-based practices that blur the boundaries between work and leisure. While there are other values-based practices that unite vocation and avocation, permaculture and natural farming are of special interest because they respond to young climate activists’ desire for ways of life that acknowledge that human activities are part of ecosystems, and that accept the need for an ecological transition.