Leisure and The Liberal Arts28:072 Satisfies or partially satisfies the University of Iowa's general education requirement for humanities (3 s.h.). |
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ABOUT THE COURSE
WRITER BENJAMIN HUNNICUTT I am a professor in the College of Liberal
Arts' Departments of Literature, Science and the Arts, and Leisure Studies. I
have been at the University of Iowa since 1975, arriving just after I
finished my Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in
American History. Since then I have been on the faculty at
the University of Iowa, serving for two years as Director of the Division of
Physical Education. I try to practice what I preach. I am active in the
community, in my church (Trinity
Episcopal Church), serving on museum boards and doing volunteer work. I play
the piano and flute and sing regularly in groups around the university and
community. With Henry David Thoreau, I believe that
walking is essential for a sane life and is a true liberal art. So I spend
time each day walking in the woods, to work, and with my wife, daughter, and
Boston Terriers, Jiggs and Sam. My publications have mainly concerned
Histories of work and leisure and include Work Without End: Abandoning
Shorter Hours For The Right To Work (1988) and Kellogg's Six-Hour Day (1995). COURSE INTRODUCTION Occasionally, the words leisure and
education are still used together. One may even find courses in leisure
education such as this one and departments of leisure study existing in
prominent American colleges. They are rare and endangered, but parents
continue to be surprised to find their children earning credits toward
graduation in this subject. Such vestiges of the past jar modern
sensibilities. An accepted part of conventional wisdom,
and perhaps morality, is that college is a serious place where important work
should be getting done. Today, teachers are charged with being the custodians
of “worthwhile” culture, and are expected to continually produce and
distribute new, more, and better truth through Herculean research efforts.
Most importantly (for parents at least), teachers are held responsible to
find "applications" of what they teach in the world of work- mainly
through preparing students for occupations and the professions. In the midst of such important and serious
undertakings, the word "leisure," and still worse, "play"
or "recreation," appearing in college catalogues have a shock
value. Administrators and faculty who support or teach such things are
frequently called upon to explain themselves to their colleagues, boards of
regents, and alarmed parents. For the most part, apologists avoid the
obvious and the now somewhat embarrassing claim that college might prepare
the individual student to make better use of his or her personal free time.
Training people to play or to make good use of leisure may be implied but is
seldom explicitly stated as one of the goals of college education. More often, educators maintain that the
study of leisure is serious and has more important purposes; such a
discipline might discover significant facts about individuals and societies
and may be used to improve work (a contented worker is more productive).
Moreover, like all other important areas of life, leisure presents
"problems" that require concentrated research and complicated
solutions (e.g., the leisure problems of the handicapped, the aged, the
unemployed, the workaholic, troubled youth, etc.). Best of all, students who study this
subject have a better than average chance to get a job directly related to
their college work—in the growing "leisure services professions."
More than ever, Americans are working on their play and leisure, parlaying
them into enormous public services and multi-billion-dollar industries that
are employment gold mines. Thus, educators confidently assert that like other
branches of education, leisure study must be important and serious since so
many problems are being solved, new truths discovered, jobs created and so
much money is being spent. But both the modern suspicion
and defense of "leisure education" are extraordinary. Over most of the history of Western
Civilization, leisure stood at the center of learning and education, not on
the periphery needing an apology or being excused because it prepared
students for working. For centuries, formal higher education, as distinct
from family instruction and apprentice training, focused on those parts of
life freest from necessity and constraint; those times that rose above
ordinary work, problems, purpose, and utility; those time that were called
leisure. Only over the last one hundred years has
this focus been shifted by a new, vigorous, and particularly modern view of
learning and education, centering on "new truths," practical
results and cash values. Only in the last two decades have apologists turned
the phrase "leisure education" on its head by claiming that
leisure, like everything else, is serious, useful, a problem to be solved, or
something to be made into an "occupation." This course is unusual or old-fashioned
then, for it seeks to raise the question of leisure, as it used to be
understood, as related to the liberal arts, and raise the traditional idea of
leisure in our world today of work without end. It is not like other courses in
"leisure education" or "leisure counseling" because it
considers leisure as the freedom or the challenge to be fully human rather
than a "problem" needing extensive research and complicated solutions.
As such, the course is relatively simple,
consisting of: 1) A history of the teaching of the Liberal
Arts primarily as a preparation for Leisure. 2) A challenge to apply your liberal
education to the common leisure you find everyday. The idea that liberal education is for life
beyond work and necessity is one of the oldest, and hence most conservative
of Western notions. It was the "central mission" of higher
education thousands of years before modern educators coined and then overused
that term. Recently the idea has acquired a distinctly
radical flavor since it seems to oppose or ignore so much of what our modern
world values most: jobs, creative work, continually improving standards of
living, the most recent scientific breakthrough, and the latest truth in
vogue. Students should be warned, therefore, that
there is a politics to the fundamentals of this course and that some public
officials and administrators see leisure's continuing in the colleges as
absurd. There is a real danger that true democratic
leisure—the original "mission" of higher education in the West, may
disappear completely from our colleges, submerged by a
"business-model" bureaucracy, false economy, elitist posturing,
"serious" research, and by academic functionaries mouthing clichés
about "central mission." There is a present threat that the heart
of the liberal arts tradition may finally cease to beat, and the zombie-like
university and world of what Joseph Pieper called, "total work,"
come at last to rule absolutely. Therefore, I feel a sense of urgency. Since
so little is being done to oppose the death of true leisure, I feel that it
is essential to try to help preserve traditional liberal arts/leisure
education as at least part of the university and to expand its influence into
other public institutions (the family and community) through this course. I am doing this after years of hesitation
and timidness. For years I thought that others, well respected and highly
paid administrators and educators, must have assumed the responsibility of
maintaining the tradition of leisure in the liberal arts- that is of
education for life rather than as just another kind of "utility.".
But I was simply baffled by the misleading rhetoric such as: "liberal
arts education is the core of learning at the University of Iowa…[and] is
considered ‘education for life,’ vital to the breath of intellectual
development" and is necessary to "expand our knowledge of the
physical world and social phenomena" and "heighten our aesthetic
sensibilities." (Quotes are from the University of Iowa’s General
Catalogue.) It became increasingly clear that such
words, if they meant anything, did not mean that liberal arts students were
being educated for leisure—for those everyday bits of freedom nearly everyone
experiences. It appeared that the purpose of such rhetoric was to be so vague
and general that it could be applied specifically and precisely to nothing.
Teaching in the College of Liberal Arts for nearly thirty years, I realized that students seldom
heard the word "leisure" in liberal arts departments other than my
own. I realized that a gap, a veritable Grand
Canyon, had opened between the common, everyday bits and pieces of freedom
that really exist in people's lives and those general, vague concepts about
"education for life," "expanding knowledge and
intellect," and "Human Opportunity." As Walter Lippmann observed some time ago,
we at the university extol "The Freedom Of Man" but ignore and even
ridicule the "freedom of ordinary men and women" at leisure. During these years, I also found that the
university's Adult Education and Extension efforts are only a little better.
Even though born out of the public concern for leisure education some sixty
years ago, adult educators have also strayed far from leisure and focused
their efforts on job preparation and "serious" or
"useful" education. The community colleges and secondary schools
have followed suit. Except for an occasional voice, the tradition of liberal arts as training for leisrue
has almost disappeared at the University of Iowa and in the state. During the time when I was discovering that
so few people at the university ever talked about common leisure, I was
teaching the history of leisure and philosophy of play practically every
semester. I was constantly haunted by a older vision of liberal education for
life that transcended necessity and working. In the writings of people such as Plato,
Aristotle, St. Thomas, J. Huizinga, Irving Babbitt, and Robert Hutchins, I
was constantly disturbed by a vision of freedom that was being lost around
me, discarded as irrelevant. Finally, unable to stand the discordance created
by what use to be envisioned and what exists now, I acted to produce this
study guide. Some of the best minds of Western
Civilization believed that liberal arts have a potential to "transform
the commonplace" and to elevate the student to the practice and habit of
free thought and discourse; to give birth to the life of the mind and offer
the chance to live freely in what Robert Hutchins called "The Great
Conversations." Educating people to transform
common leisure into uncommon freedom is the last, best hope for the liberal
arts. Unless those who profess the
liberal arts realize the importance of such an endeavor, Liberal Arts will
continue to be petrified by bureaucracy, vocationalism, researchism, elitism,
and scientism until the "liberal" part, the essential free part, of
liberal education disappears completely and the "central mission"
of higher education in the West aborted at last. Signs of that process are unmistakable, one
of the most glaring of which in that in the University of Iowa's General
Catalogue, the word "freedom" does not appear (try this yourself-
go to the Internet and lookup the Catalogue at http://www.uiowa.edu/registrar/catalog/index.html
and see if you can find the word- or even "Free" or "leisure."
(compare with the words "work," vocation," "career,"
etc.) COURSE ORGANIZATION I reiterate that the course design is
simple and in two main parts: 1) history of leisure as the purpose of
teaching and performing the liberal arts, expressed as a central theme in the
literature and art of the Western world and 2) specific application of liberal arts
skills to common leisure. Ideally, and TIME PERMITTING, each of the
two main parts is subdivided. The first part is divided between a) leisure in the classical tradition,
Greece and Rome b) the resurgence and democratization of
"leisure education" fifty to sixty years ago in the United states, c) the appearance and domination of
vocationalism, jobism, researchism, and scientism and the dimming of leisure
during and since the Great Depression. The second part of the course is subdivided
into practical leisure applications of general, traditional liberal arts
skills: a) reading b) writing c) nature d) memory, imagination, and creating e) community culture creation and
preservation of minority and ethnic cultures f) playing and appreciating. Altogether there are nine major
subdivisions. There is a final, tenth section concerning the future possibilities
of leisure and the liberal arts. In this last section, suggestions will be
made for ways to keep the liberal education tradition alive during the time
that the liberal arts colleges are ignoring it or strategies for taking
action if the colleges abandon it for good. Suggestions about how public institutions
such as the library, museums, adult education and the recreation center;
private traditional institutions such as the church and the family; modern
volunteer organizations such as the YMCA, Masons, etc. might take up the
torch and offer liberal education for the common leisure of the people of
Iowa. In recent years, the issue of work sharing has become a political issue
in several countries around the world. Attention will be paid to how the
coming of shorter hours as an economic and political issue has a very real
impact on the teaching of the liberal arts. SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY The first part of the course, the history
of leisure and the liberal arts, will be mostly reading assignments. I am
primarily interested in sharing the traditional vision of "learning for
its own sake" in the works of philosopher of antiquity and in the
rebirth of this idea during the early part of this century. Even though these
ideas might sound strange to you, even absurd given what modern life
"requires," try to read the history with sympathy and
understanding. Read it "as if" it made sense to you, "as
if" it had relevance to your life today. Think of all the history you
read as making on complete, simple story; "the rise, resurgence, and
fall of leisure education." As you read, think of questions to ask
about the story: "Why did it happen?" "Was it a good or bad
thing that leisure was largely replaced by work and research?" "Was
it inevitable that leisure be replaced in the school curriculum?" Try to
come up with answers to your own questions. There will be one exam after the history
sections of the course. In the essay sections of the exam I will
look for your own thoughts about the course. I will not be content if you just
repeat back to me what you have read. Students who only memorize what they
read for the exam are, in my judgment, "C" students at best.
Students who do well in this class will have studied and mastered the
readings to be sure. But they will also be able to synthesize; that is, to
digest the readings, ask their own questions, and find additional information
and answers on their own. "A" students will tell me something I did
not know on their exams; they will give solid evidence that they have struggled
with the material and found their own way through it. By writing out the answers to the practice
essay questions at the end of each history subsection, you will be able to
practice analysis and try out your own judgments. In general, you should try
to make at least one or two of your own "stick-out-your-neck"
claims—that is, make a some claim that you then must defend. Do not be afraid
to make your own claims, even if you find it hard to defend them or even come
to disagree with what you assert. The main thing is to say something on you
own and then have to support it. Writing about safe things and making easy
assertions will get you a safe "C." Boldness opens the possibility
of something better. The second section is similar to a
workbook. The assignments are much more definite; e.g., "write a journal
entry of five pages." You will not be required to analyze and make
judgments so much as to actually practice doing liberal arts skills and
finding ways to use them in common leisure. But I will still look for creativity
and for evidence of your own ideas over and above the ones I give you in this
study guide. This is a new course. It tries to
reintroduce an old idea into a modern setting. As such, it must be
experimental. There are no guides for me other than old, dusty books and
thoughts and my own fevered imagination. In a real sense, you will help write
the course with me. It will be up to you to find new, practical ways to apply
liberal arts to common leisure and practice that application until it becomes
a viable part of your own life and of our community life. I will look to you
to provide me with concrete suggestions and guidance in these matters. Here
is your opportunity to be creative. I can think of few more exciting class
assignments. You will be doing things, kinds of "research," that no
one, to my knowledge, is doing. You will be working to renew one of the
oldest and best of our Western Traditions. I look forward to sharing your discoveries
with students who take this course after you. I also hope sincerely that your
efforts will transcend this class; that you continued to use the liberal arts
in your everyday life, in common leisure, to your and your community's
benefit. This class will fail if what you learn does not make a real,
practical difference to you in the future. COURSE READINGS The readings for this course are open-ended; that is, one book leads to the next and so forth. Hence the idea of the course is that of a "self- guided" reading programs to take you through your own culture and allow you to engage in the "the Great Conversations." |
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