“Let me begin with an objection, an objection of the kind which the scholastics called a Videtur quod non. Now of all times, in the post-war years, is not the time to talk about leisure. We are, after all, busy building our house. Our hands are full and there is work for all. And surely, until our task is done and our house rebuilt, the only thing that matters is to strain every nerve.”

So begins Josef Pieper’s classic work, Leisure the Basis of Culture, published in 1952. As we plan for the post-Covid-19 years, we too face the same objections. Enough of quarantine and forced idleness. Our country, economy and society must be rebuilt — and so we need to strain every nerve until the task is achieved and our post-industrial machine purrs with life once more.

Pieper acknowledged this argument but stuck to his guns, arguing that “one of the foundations of Western culture is leisure”. Drawing on Aristotle’s argument in the Nicomachean Ethics that “we are unleisurely in order to have leisure”, he also noted that Aristotle claimed in his Politics that “the first principle of all action is leisure” and that “leisure is better than occupation and is its end”.

What is striking about these ideas from the Politics is that they appear in a chapter about education. Given the high value that Aristotle placed on the right ordering of education, this focus on leisure and its relationship with learning might surprise us. However, as Pieper wrote, the link is implicit in the etymology of the word: “for leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English ‘school.’ ‘School’ does not, properly speaking, mean school, but leisure.”

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Home schooling could be a blessing in disguise

By Dominic Frisby

We live in a very different world from Aristotle. Our education system was forged in the industrial fires of the 19th century and so has largely accepted the ethos of total work that dominated that age. The image that best describes schools even today is the factory, complete with measurable outcomes, quality assurance, constant testing, and all the rest of it. With the factory as the dominant image, we can understand why the closure of schools has caused such angst. Since the production line has ground to a halt, children are no longer able to be productive.

No wonder that many parents feel frazzled. As they desperately struggle to hang onto their jobs or keep their businesses going, they also feel under pressure to ensure that their children remain productive. Nor has that anxiety been diminished by the sudden shift to remote learning. They may wonder what their children are up to on the computer all day. They may fear that, whatever they’re doing, they are surely falling behind.

The fundamental problem here is not the lockdown per se but the assumption that leisure is the enemy of education rather than the basis from which it proceeds. The truth of the matter is that effective learning begins when we escape from the industrial model, when we remember that there is more to education that interactive whiteboards, school bells, and public exams.

The school as factory is not the only image available to us. As a schoolteacher, I work to the bell: as a home educator, I work to a different conception of time, a rhythm that many families are now discovering under lockdown. What the Slow Movement did for food, we are trying to do for our children’s education. We don’t track school terms or mimic the school day. We give each task the time it needs. My eldest daughter writes stories every day but I don’t demand that she hand in a finished version every Monday morning.

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Who needs schools anyway?

By Roy Peachey

Our approach to education stems from our appreciation of leisure, which, according to Josef Pieper, isn’t “simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation.” Or a lockdown, we might add. “Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence… leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.”

This positive understanding of leisure is hugely empowering. It suggests that children can still learn when they aren’t in school. It implies that education continues even when formal teaching is suspended. It helps us see that it is only when we are open to the world and the knowledge it contains that we can truly learn.

That has certainly been my experience as a schoolteacher and a home educator. The children who thrive in and out of school are the ones who know how to make good use of their leisure time, not those who fritter it away online or even those who spend hours and hours on their homework. The standout students are the ones who have open minds and who pursue knowledge for its own sake.

The lockdown has caused much pain, but it has also given us a golden opportunity to put joy, love and leisure back at the heart of education, as John Holt argued in How Children Learn:

“Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.”

What our children need are not techniques but the time and space they have so unexpectedly been given by the mass closure of schools. The time and space to learn with their parents. The time and space to discover things for themselves. True leisure is the breeding ground in which healthy curiosity can grow.

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Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

While I was writing this article, one of my daughters bounced up to me with a poster she was designing about ‘Four Things to do during Lockdown.’ 1. Aim to learn something new before lockdown ends. 2. Help around the house. 3. Get outside. 4. Read or write something new. More importantly, she has taken the initiative to follow her own advice. She’s been researching Mesopotamia, baking cakes, working on her nature journal, and reading a lot. Oh yes, and she’s also been learning to unicycle. My role as parent and teacher has been to help her on her way.

And after the lockdown ends? My fear is that we will return to educational normality, or at least, to what has passed for normality since the Victorian revolution. What I long for is a Slow Education movement grounded in a renewed appreciation of leisure, home educators and schools coming together to share their expertise, parents and teachers working in tandem, each respecting the other’s work. Only then will we end the boom or bust approach to education that sees students become paralysed with anxiety during term time and then veg out during holidays. Only then will we transform the education our children receive.

When my wife suggested that we consider homeschooling our daughter, I was aghast. I had been to school. Everyone I knew had been to school. My only experience of home education was seeing Ruth Lawrence on the back of her dad’s tandem, cycling round Oxford. I knew that homeschooling was not for the likes of us. It was odd. It was possibly dangerous. It was certainly wholly other.

“But it’s what she needs,” my wife pointed out.

Like many adopted children, our daughter needed more individual attention than any school could give, even the excellent one she was attending at the time. So we decided to give homeschooling a go – hoping that it would be good for her, making it up as we went along.

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Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

We started by asking her what she wanted to study. “Greek,” she answered. (She was seven at the time.) “And can we have an assembly at the end of the week?”

Not wanting to dampen her enthusiasm, we found some resources for Ancient Greek and launched into an assembly on that first Friday afternoon. It was a reassuringly familiar ritual, so our daughter was happy. Doubly so because she was Star of the Week.

Without ever vocalising the thought in those early days, I assumed that my wife and I had an oracular position in our home school. With several degrees and decades of teaching experience between us, we could fairly claim to be experts. It was a good job I never expressed that view out loud because it’s nonsense. We were just as much amateurs as anyone else.

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The myth of the 'growth mindset'

By Tom Chivers

At first we tried to recreate school at home. We had bookcases full of resources. We had a beautifully constructed timetable. We had wall displays. Then it slowly dawned on us that not only could we not keep up – Greek soon fell by the wayside – we didn’t need to. Like Neil Postman before us, we discovered that “education is not the same thing as schooling, and that, in fact, not much of our education takes place in school”.

Gradually we came to understand that school is a continuation of education by other means, not the model to which home educators should aspire — so we stopped homeschooling and started home-educating instead. As we did so, we discovered what we had dimly known all along: that everything we do with our children is education. This meant that we could happily jettison the institutional detritus that was weighing us down. We didn’t need to follow a set curriculum. We ditched termly tests. We gave our children – two of them now – the time and freedom to learn.

Dredging our grotty garden pond into something approaching respectability was the first step on our new educational journey. As far as I was concerned, the plan was simply to tidy up an eyesore in the back garden but the unintended consequence was frogs. Dozens of them. My children were delighted.

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We don't need no secondary education

By Geoff Norcott

And then my schoolteacher instincts kicked in. We need to do a project on this, I thought. We need to write stuff down otherwise it won’t be properly educational. But we didn’t. We allowed the frogs to do their work. Awe and wonder and love rarely make it into Biology textbooks, as David W. Orr has pointed out. But awe, wonder, and a love of nature are surely necessary conditions for scientific enquiry.

So, as the seasons roll, we now give our children time to appreciate, assimilate and reflect. We no longer obey the diktats of the school bell, nor do we pay much attention to the shape of the school day or the length of school terms. Our children sing their history, sometimes in public, to the amusement and bemusement of passersby. They read for hours in whichever part of the house they find most comfortable. They learn while walking the dog or travelling in the car.

This may sound like a homely version of Summerhill but the reality is quite different. Our children can’t do whatever they like and they still have lessons – and, yes, they have friends and socialise perfectly well. But the education they receive is more tidal than industrial. And so is ours.

Home education has forced us to rethink education, but that hasn’t been its only gift to us. Having taken our children out of school, we were surprised to find that our own education resumed. I used to believe that education was something that had happened – an experience that existed only in the past tense. I went to school. Then I studied at university. Then I got on with life. Education ended when paying the mortgage began.

Except it didn’t. Home education hauled it out of the past and back into the present, which is why I don’t look back in anger at my schooldays. Or with nostalgia. In fact, I don’t look back at all. There’s no longer any need.

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The victims of a liberal education

By Helen Thompson

The moment we realised that everything we do with our children is education, we began to understand that home education is a reciprocal process. Our children teach us while we teach them. They have an inspiring curiosity about the world. They routinely surprise us with knowledge we have not explicitly taught them. They are the first encyclopedias I turn to when I need information about animals, countries or trees.

I still teach part-time in a school but I teach better now that I am a home educator. My 11-year old daughter has taught me the importance of re-reading books. My six-year old has taught me not to underestimate the importance of simply listening to children. As a schoolteacher, I thought I had education taped. I now realise I have hardly begun to understand it.

Taking our children out of school forced us to make hard decisions about careers, finances and priorities, but the benefits have been enormous. And there has been no greater benefit than spending time with them. Lots of time. So, at this time of year, as students head back to school, we continue where we hardly left off, living an education at home, homing in on education outside. We don’t need to go back to school: we’re already there. There really is no place like home.