An Education for Leisure
In a recent post, I discussed which qualifications home educating families might want to work towards. I focussed mainly on American exams and so, for the sake of balance, I also want to consider the case for GCSEs and A Levels in my next post. However, for the time being, I would like to step back from exams altogether and think about the curious notion of educating for leisure.
The classic book on this topic is Josef Pieper’s Leisure: the Basis for Culture, which I have written about in an article for UnHerd and also in Out of the Classroom and Into the World. But it’s not the only book to have addressed the issue. I am, for example, currently reading The Scent of Time by Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han in which he points out that:
Aristotle divided life into two areas, into time employed for non-leisure (a-scholia) and time of leisure (schole), that is into non-rest and rest. Work, as non-rest, as un-freedom, must be subordinated to leisure.
He then draws out the implications of this counter-cultural understanding:
Leisure, being schola, is outside of work and outside of inactivity. It is a special ability and requires a specific education. It is not a practice of ‘relaxation’ or of ‘switching off’.
Like Pieper, Han insists that leisure isn’t simply a recharging of the batteries - it doesn’t serve work - but is significant in its own right. That’s why it requires a specific education. In other words, we need to teach our children how to be leisurely!
At first glance, this seems completely mad. Surely we need to teach our children to work hard? Surely, in a fallen world, their (and our) natural inclination is to do all they can to avoid hard work? And yet Byung-Chul Han (and, by implication, Josef Pieper and Aristotle) insists that we need to give them an education for leisure.
I was mulling this over while taking an art lesson this weekend. I’m learning how to create an icon and it’s quite an education, partly because everything’s so slow. Not slow because the lessons are inefficient, but slow of necessity. A rushed icon is no icon at all. Here’s Byung-Chul Han again:
The highest form of happiness has its source in the contemplative lingering on beauty, the activity that used to be called theoria. Its temporal dimension is duration. It turns towards those things that are imperishable and unchanging, the things that rest entirely in themselves.
Icons are made to last. The materials with which they are made, and the tradition in which they are made, are perhaps not imperishable and unchanging, but they are as close as you are likely to get in a changing world, precisely because the object of the icon is God himself, who is imperishable and unchanging. That is why Byung-Chul Han puts contemplation, by which he means “lingering with God in loving attentiveness”, at the centre of his book. This, then, is the education our children need. They need to learn how to linger with God.
And the reason they need such an education is because we live in a world where lingering with God in loving attentiveness is actively discouraged. There is, Han says, a restlessness inherent in the smartphone, and not just in the smartphone:
The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering.
That’s a quotation from another of his books, The Disappearance of Rituals: a Topology of the Present.
So what might an education for leisure look like? Byung-Chul Han suggests that a good place to start is attending to that which endures, for the “real problem is that all that endures, all that lasts and is slow, threatens to disappear altogether, or to be absent from life.” So let’s return to my icon class which is built around materials which are designed to last and which take time to prepare.
Starting with some really high quality wood, we outlined the final design:
The next stage was laying down a layer of clay in preparation for the gold leaf:
I show this next picture to demonstrate how hard it is to apply the gold leaf. To be honest, I made a right mess of it! What you can’t see here is the process itself, which involved breathing onto the clay many times in order to create the moisture needed to apply the gold leaf. It’s supposed to be a slow, meditative experience and it gradually became that, though I felt immense frustration at first because I couldn’t get it right. In other words, I had to work on myself before I worked on the icon. I had to learn to control myself in order to create the desired effect.
This brings us back to Byung-Chul Han who writes about the importance of “hesitancy” and “waiting” in the vita contemplativa. Another way of putting it is to say that reality pushes back against us, as Matthew Crawford often points out. We can’t simply master it. We can’t blunder our way through it. We need to respect it and that means we sometimes need to hesitate. This is a great lesson for both adults and children to learn.
I think it also helps us answer the point I raised earlier about the importance of hard work. What I have learned while creating an icon is that I need to work through problems rather than rush through them. This is what we want for our children too: that they give each task the time it needs, especially when that means they need to step back in order to figure out a way forward. Hesitancy and waiting are important aspects of hard work.
I’m finding the iconographic approach really fascinating because it’s quite different from painting with watercolours. When creating an icon, you move from darkness to light, from chaos to order. As you can see, I’m still at the chaos stage! There’s still a long way to go before the icon is finished, though I have begun to address some of the gold leaf problems I faced earlier in the process.
What I’m discovering is that there is much more to creating an icon than learning a new technique. I have had to learn how to create in an entirely new way. I have to work slowly and contemplatively. In a sense, I have to learn to work less efficiently. That is to say, I have to set aside industrial conceptions of efficiency in order to rediscover the best way to respond to this ancient tradition.
So, am I saying that our children should all find themselves an iconography teacher? No, of course not (though Hanna Ward, my teacher, is great! I’ll recommend her forthcoming exhibition at the end of this post). However, I am suggesting that we should direct them away from consumerism (“people spending money they don’t have, on things they don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last on people they don’t care about,” as Tim Jackson expressively describes it) and towards that which endures.
Where else can our children obtain and education for leisure? One answer is that they just need to step outdoors. My local home educating community has been doing an astronomy module recently, for instance. In effect, what they’ve learned is how to lingering over (or under) the stars with a pair of binoculars or a telescope. Working with animals is another option. My children have gained a great deal from spending time outside at a local farm and local stables, where industrial time is simply irrelevant.
But we don’t have to go outside to linger. If we create the right conditions inside, and if we resist the temptation to schedule every moment of our children’s lives, we might well find that they develop a love for books, with all that that entails, especially if we carve out time to read to them.
And therein lies the greatest challenge of all. We all lead busy lives. We all get caught up in busy-ness. Sometimes it takes a real effort of will - and close cooperation between spouses - to carve out lingering time for ourselves. After all, we can hardly expect our children to linger if we never do. And if that sounds like moonshine, perhaps we can home in on clearing our Sundays. Maybe it’s on the Sabbath that our education for leisure begins.
That sounds like a good place to end (and begin), but I’ll leave you with the exhibition I mentioned earlier. Hanna’s icons are in churches and collections all round the world (including the Royal Collection here in the UK), so this is a golden opportunity to see some wonderful icons and to learn more about the iconographic tradition. If you want to try it for yourself, that’s an option too. Why travel into central London when you could go to Caterham instead?