First word that comes to your mind when you hear the word “school” — Go! What did you come up with? Tests? Desks? Homework? Crowded? If I asked a hundred people, I doubt one of them would answer, “leisure”  — but that is, in fact, the original meaning of the Greek word from which we get the word “school”: scholē. It is the opposite of “ascholia,” which means preoccupation, being kept busy with survival and worldly affairs. School, leisure. I don’t know about you, but I find this stunning. When people say education has come a long way, they’re not kidding! But…which way? Where’s it heading? And where did it start?

To begin, the ancient Greeks viewed neither of these terms, schol֒ē and ascholia, as inherently bad. However, ascholia was considered inferior, a sort of necessary constraint. Along with rest (anapausis), both were aspects of a balanced life, but the highest aim was scholē.  Ascholia consisted of activities that kept people busy, but was not, by definition, “busy work.” Rather it referred to serious business necessitated by the strictures of daily life. It was the sustenance of life and the maintenance of civilization: agriculture, domestic labor, trade, politics, governance — much of the same stuff that consumes our lives today, even if it looks a little different. Busyness for its own sake, work just to fill time or justify time spent, had no place. It didn’t even have a word. Ascholia was an indispensable use of time. And yet, scholē was considered a far more worthwhile pursuit from which ascholia was the distraction.

Like us, the ancient Greeks put a high value on their time, but they measured this value differently. We hear “leisure” and imagine relaxing poolside with a cocktail, window shopping, binge watching a new show, but other than the fact that these activities are relaxing, they do not resemble what the ancients meant by scholē. Scholē was not purely entertainment or killing time. It had purpose. However, it was not a means to an end either. It was an end in and of itself, its purpose inherent. That is the defining quality of scholē. People work (ascholia) for personal and communal survival. They rest so they may work again, but they participate in scholē simply because they’re human. 

Schol֒ē is both relaxing and pleasurable, but more than that, it is the fulfillment of our humanity. It is the playground of inquiry and wonder, art and music, creative and critical thought. Theorizing, investigating, conceptualizing, working out a puzzle, studying nature are all scholē. Making music is scholē. Appreciating music is scholē. Anyone can participate in it: the next Einstein or a questioning five-year-old child  — he need only be human. Simply lying in bed watching the snow fall is rest. It’s not scholē. But wondering about it, is. In modern times, we don’t place much value on wondering for it produces no obvious outcome. Shoveling the snow is a better use of time, we say. However, it’s worth noticing at least, that the ancients saw it the other way around. Scholē was held with such high regard that the education of their youth was built upon it.

Scholē was not the only thing that happened in ancient Greek (mostly Athenian) schools, but it was the point of it.  Learning (mathēsis*), acquiring new information and skills systematically through observation, study, practice and memorization, was a necessary component of education.  Learning and education were not synonymous concepts as they are often thought of today. The former was in service to the latter, and because learning was a necessary discipline, it qualified more as ascholia than scholē. True scholē was the aim of education and because it is a state of carefree enjoyment, it could only be achieved when one’s anxieties and frustrations were relieved through the completion of ascholia tasks. So ascholia and scholē are in a tug-of-war for ascholia is both a distraction from scholē and, arguably, the means to reach it.  

Any work related to a person’s livelihood, obligations and deadlines, must be attended — all major stress alleviated — before scholē can be enjoyed. (Think about what this means for kids dealing with social or school anxiety.) Additionally, scholē is expansive by nature, so for it to be continually enjoyed, a person must continue to learn.  A toddler observes that when her mother shuts the cabinet door, it goes bang (learning), so she spends the next half hour opening and shutting it, testing her new discovery (schol֒ē).  A teen learns the golden ratio in Geometry class, then spots it in everyday life throughout the week, pondering why nature favors this pattern and what that reveals about universal beauty. In both cases, the toddler and teen will stop at some point from satisfaction, boredom, frustration, or distraction, often triggering or even necessitating more learning. 

This process can be a bit clumsy and irregular, quite stop and go. Learning is a labor,often uncomfortable and awkward — scholē its reward, a reward enjoyed sporadically before petering out. Sometimes, though, the process is entirely seamless, a flow state in which the reflections of scholē spark enlightenment, prompting curiosity, research, then culminating in even more joyous contemplation. In this sense the learning is continuous. Though scholē, by definition (leisure), is not an effort to learn material or achieve any particular goal, it is arguably still “learning” in the sense that it often produces wisdom and understanding, in the same way that fruit yields more fruit. And just as the apple tree is defined by its fruit, education is defined by the state of scholē.

A problem with modern schools is that classroom activity often rides the line between ascholia and scholē while achieving neither. We are not very clear on the purpose of school, but it is certainly not scholē, rather something more utilitarian. We like activities that are useful, and our time must be justified. Every lesson should have a clear objective, every minute of class aimed at meeting that objective, and every objective tested to ensure that it has been met. The expectation to produce and perform gives way to self-justifying busywork. On the other hand, we prioritize information that is not the most directly useful. Algebra and geometry are mainstays of high school curriculum while statistics and personal finance are not. By prioritizing ascholia activities and shoehorning every subject, practical or not, into that framework, we fail to recognize and teach what is truly useful for practical living. Likewise, by insisting that everything worth learning be directly useful, we rob impractical knowledge of its inherent joy and beauty, blunting scholē before it even begins.

School has drifted quite far from its original meaning, carrying all sorts of confused connotations, which explains why The Learning Cooperatives have struggled with the decision to even use the term in our marketing. We are not a school. We are an alternative to school that is perhaps closer to its namesake than school itself.  School, I’d argue, is largely a workplace for keeping busy, which is not truly “school” — school being scholē, which is not learning in the basic sensing of studying and retaining new information for that is actually ascholia or “not school”, which happens to be preparation for scholē, which is more like a kind of play, which ironically is learning in a deeper sense, which is still not school — but should be. No wonder we’re confused about the direction of education!

*from which we get the word “mathematics”