Dear Fellow Traveler,
What is the meaning of learning? You may never have considered the question. For most of us, school was mandatory—we didn’t have a choice, and perhaps no one explained exactly why we went to school.
In their book Learning the Good Life, Jessica Hooten Wilson and Jacob Stratman write,
Do you know where the word school comes from? The ancients (like Socrates and Virgil) used the Greek word schole and the Latin word scola, from which our word school is derived, and it means ‘leisure.’ … They thought of leisure as ‘contemplation,’ as attention toward the highest goods in life, such as truth and beauty. …
For the Greek philosopher Aristotle, “We are unleisurely in order to have leisure.” Or, put another way, we work so that we may dedicate our time to higher things like contemplation. As Wilson and Stratman suggest, “School should be the space or place that provides you time to learn higher things; you may learn about what it means to live well, love what’s worth loving, and become wise.”
Learning (or leisure) is a way of being; it’s an orientation to life. In philosophical and spiritual traditions, it connects with what is often called “the contemplative life.” However, the American philosopher Beatrice Bruteau noted, “For many of us, ‘leisure’ actually raises difficulties: difficulties about conceiving it, justifying it, wanting it, and practicing it.”
