But life is much more than work. I am certain that if students show an interest in questions beyond how to become better workers, if they exhibit a desire to learn for its own sake, they will meet people who are just as eager for it as they are.
-question things and long for thinks for a greater purpose to live a truly fulfilled life.
College professors often contribute to the problem. We fly through a hundred slides in a 50-minute lecture. We pride ourselves on how difficult our classes are. We hunker down at home to avoid chance encounters with students or colleagues.
-professors prove to be part of this greater issue of overworking college students.
“Only in genuine leisure does a ‘gate to freedom’ open.” It’s a sign of our pinched cultural values that universities are so resistant to saying that this is their core mission.
-genuine leisure is where freedom is evident and you can live a life less for others, and more for your own true desires and happiness.
“Gosh, it’s more than fun,” he replied. “You’re part of creating something that’s larger than you.”Advertisement
-something you must live by, living for something larger than yourself, having a greater purpose to succeed.
It’s not optional for us to confront those questions,” Mr. Hadzi-Antich said. “We confront them because we’re human.”
-we question and confront things in life because we are human and are meant to question things within our own reality constantly.
It was the life of the mind, something like Aristotle’s ideal. I wanted to live like that, too.
-the realization that your professor, someone you may look up to, can live a life of enjoyment as well without a life dedicated and dictated by work.
But if it’s the only value that defines a life, then students don’t need a true education at all. They don’t need to construct a vision of the whole world and their place in it. They don’t need to address the larger questions that arise through open-ended discussion with professors and peers. They need just narrowly focused training.
-to desire a life with work and no enjoyment cannot even be considered living at all. Further they cannot live to a full potential in thinking in such a linear way
make it possible for people to “function faultlessly and without breakdown” but rather that they make it possible for workers to remain human.
-a human cannot function with leisure, therefore the expectation of college in unrealistic to expect a human to work as if they were a robot.
contemplation as the highest human activity and thus essential to happiness. “For we do business in order that we may have leisure,” Aristotle wrote, implying that leisure must therefore be a greater thing than work.
-a human cannot function without leisure. It remains an absolute essential to human happiness and even for simply a human to function.
“Leisure: The Basis of Culture,” that the word “school” comes from the Greek “schole,” which means “leisure.”
-school was never meant to be all about work, the name was derived from leisure and the basis of relaxation and a growing from the very start.
But the expectation that college will help them land a job has led too many students to approach college like a job in its own right: a series of grim tasks that, once completed, qualifies them to perform grimmer but better-paid tasks until retirement. That’s a shame, because this mentality leaves no room for what college should primarily be about: not work but leisure.
-college is not all about working yourself to the point of failure, it can be about and should be about leisure just as well.