This year, I have had the chance to teach Medieval history and literature, so I find myself taken in by an urge to start this essay off in the style of a good disputation, of the sort that was common in the cathedral schools and universities of the Middle Ages. The question at hand for me concerns the way the task of learning ought to be conceived at a fundamental level.
On this topic, here is a relevant quote from Aristotle: “youths are not to be instructed with a view to their amusement, for learning is no amusement, but is accompanied with pain.”
And here is one from Schiller: “we know it is precisely play, and play alone, which of all man’s states and conditions is the one that makes him whole and unfolds both sides of his nature at once.”
At work or at play? What is it that a student is up to when he or she is learning? How are we best to understand that particular activity of the mind that is directed towards the augmentation of its own powers and resources? Is it fundamentally a mode of labor, of effort, which entails a certain degree of pain? Or is it a mode of play or recreation in which the soul delectates in its own completion? These are sharply distinct, even antagonistic, kinds of activity, and as Aristotle’s quote makes clear, it does not seem like learning can be both of them at the same time.
The distinctive feature of work is that at times it is undertaken contrary to the will of the worker. Work is something that we often do not want to do. Clearly, academic work fits this description. Entice and encourage as we might, there are always going to be students who find something uninviting about syllogisms and differential equations and Great Expectations. To get them to engage with this coursework they must in some way be required to do so, to exert an effort that does not emanate from a pleasure they take in the work, but from some sense it is mandated. In this sense, learning appears like work.
The distinctive feature of play is that we engage in it for its own sake. We work towards some particular end, but we play simply in order to play. The pleasure that we derive from play itself is the sufficient motive for the activity. Those who have had the privilege of receiving a fine education – who have had the experience of encountering great minds and great ideas and felt the attendant expansion of their own mental horizons – know that this experience itself is a good that needs no further justification. The exhilaration that accompanies true intellectual growth is its own reward. In this sense, learning appears like play.
I have said that the distinctive feature of work is that it is often undertaken contrary to the will of the worker. Some readers may have balked at this definition, and for good reason. Obviously, there are those for whom their work is a source of pleasure, and who would rather be engaged in this work than in other forms of activity. There are certain kinds of artisans, for instance, who take great satisfaction in the effort it takes to bring the artefact to completion; certain sorts of businessmen who derive a sense of accomplishment from improving the status of their company. One of the long-standing complaints about modernity is the divorce it has occasioned between labor and contentment, and I think there is much to this complaint.
Yet clearly, this capacity to derive pleasure from work is not an innate one. Children do not like hard work; that is why it is necessary to couch so much of the instruction in the earliest stages of education in the form of play. We might ask then how one arrives at the state in which work becomes a source of pleasure? What is the process through which arduous forms of labor can be transformed into genuine forms of play, and through which a mind adverse to such labor is trained to seek it out on account of the satisfaction it derives from the task? In the classroom, this specifically means asking how the mental exertions of concentration and creativity can be sustained during those periods of a child’s education when the objects of that concentration and creativity are not desirable in and of themselves, and how those objects can be rendered desirable over time, such that the concentration and creativity required for their adequate study arise spontaneously in the student, and not by way of external enforcement.
I said that play is undertaken as an end in itself. People do not play toward this or that purpose, but simply in order to play, to do the thing itself. To use the terminology of Alasdair MacIntyre, play is typically a form of practice to which the goods are internal. If students are to become willing learners, it is critical to ensure that their course of study entails such internal goods, and, just as critically, that they are made aware of this fact continuously. Students must understand that the things they study have a value in and of themselves, and not as criteria for advancement in the social or economic sphere. This points to the need for the moral and aesthetic content that classical educators have made such a point of embracing, since the transcendental qualities of beauty and goodness are, by definition, the encompassing ends of human desire, sufficient and satisfactory in and of themselves. Only by infusing their course of study with the good and the beautiful – and only by recurrently calling their attention to their presence - can we hope to elicit from students the capacity for that sort of willing effort that is the hallmark of the well-trained mind. By largely excluding such internal goods from the curricula of their schools, modern educators have not only rendered their courses of study highly distasteful to their students, but also left themselves with no other language to articulate the mission of those schools, to themselves and to the public, than the language of external benefits – college placement, career readiness, and so on.
Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, emphasizes the centrality of aesthetic engagement to a child’s proper development. He writes: “it is…one of the most important tasks of education to subject man to form even in his purely physical life, and to make him aesthetic in every domain over which beauty is capable of extending her sway.” A course of study inflected by a genuinely aesthetic sensibility is one that calls out all the energies of play since, as again he writes, “with beauty man shall only play, and it is with beauty only that he shall play.” But how to do this? How to discover the possibilities for beauty throughout the curriculum? How to display the aesthetic contours of material that can often seem quite dry and forbidding? A quite brilliant discussion of just this task can be found in Kenneth Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition, where they discuss the possibilities of enhancing contemporary science instruction with the medieval’s conception of “natural philosophy,” which captured a more encompassing vision of nature, one replete with “wonder, wisdom, work, and worship.” The teaching of history, too, offers opportunity for tapping into students’ aesthetic sensibilities by prioritizing cultural and artistic developments alongside political and intellectual ones. So for instance, in my program’s curriculum, the study of ancient history means the study of the Peloponnesian War and Classical Era sculpture; the study of the Middle Ages means the study of the Investiture Controversy and illuminated manuscripts. I am sure there are some students who gaze upon the Book of Kells or the Apollo Belvedere and ask themselves, “why am I studying this?” – but there are not many.
What this process suggests is that there is more being aimed at in the proper schooling of a child than the imparting of facts and skills – more, that is, than just a kind of intellectual growth. If a purpose of education is to transform students from unwilling to willing workers, it follows that one of the high purposes of education is to transform the will, to teach students to desire in new and more fruitful ways. The will that cannot see beyond the tedium of the task at hand is slowly replaced by the will that sees the larger academic context in which that task is carried out; the will that desires only exemption from effort is replaced by the will that enjoys the benefits of self-discipline; the will that is consumed with immediate forms of satisfaction is replaced by the will that is directed towards the life-long process of intellectual and moral improvement. The student who has progressed far along in this transformation is one who freely undertakes the difficult work inevitably involved in such improvement.
Yet this is obviously rare enough. Students who eagerly, or even willingly, throw themselves into their studies are not common. Such readiness towards mental exertion is typically found, when it is found, in students at the earliest stages of their education, when most instruction is couched as a form of play, or in the later stages of education, when they have been successfully transformed in the way I have just described. But most students at most stages of their education are unwilling learners of one sort or another. As a result, an effective course of study must include – along with the regular enticements to aesthetic play I referred to – some mechanism of enforcement to ensure that students continue to work during all those times and in regard to all that subject matter that they do not wish to. It is necessary for the teacher to supply the will that is lacking in students at such periods, until such time as this will takes form in the students themselves. Assessment, grading, forms of discipline – these too comprise the proper inducements of a school. Their use follows from Aristotle’s insight about learning constituting a form of work, at least at times. If I have one general critique to make about the classical schooling movement as a whole, at this stage, it is that most of its theoretical and practical elucidations are focused on those elements of classical methodology that approach learning as a form of play, while dwelling with less explicitness on those methods required to ensure that students enrolled in classical schools do the necessary work when inclined otherwise. There are good reasons for this focus, but I often find myself wishing classical educators would speak more frankly from time to time about the tedious, workaday practices that must be employed to elicit a consistent effort from students.
It is too simple to say that a school should mix periods of work with periods of play, though some form of variety obviously seems desirable. The key is to combine them in such a way that students can be invited to play with the material when they are likely to find such play desirable, and are compelled to work at the material when they are likely to require compulsion, and are gradually trained to understand the work they do as necessary for the improvement of their soul, and so desire the improvement of their soul that they engage in that work with intrinsic elan. Designing such a course of study requires both tremendous learning and extensive experience with young souls.
At this stage, perhaps something like a preliminary answer – vague and provisional, to be sure – to our original question has come into view. Learning is at times a form of work, at other times a form of play, but it is over the course of time the process by which students come to see that work as a form of play, which is just to say, by which they come to relish the labor involved in learning. It is the mode of development through which students become accustomed to exert themselves in their studies with joyful readiness. As such, it is the mode of development which trains the mind to delight in the final goods of its own capacities, in the truth, goodness, and beauty for which it was made, but which are not to be attained without great efforts. Learning is learning to become a proper learner, the sort of person who recreates in the contemplation of the first and last things, and who is willing to endure whatever mental and spiritual labors are required to make themselves capable of such contemplation.
I doubt I have said anything particularly substantive on this topic; I am certain I have said nothing new. My only aim here has been – in accordance with my topic – to play with this question and to bring out as many of its aspects as I could. Hopefully, in doing so, I have at least called attention to the centrality of this question to the project of education, and to the basic need to balance the demands of work and play in a well-designed course of study.