Leisure and The Liberal Arts
28:072 Partially satisfies the University of Iowa's general education requirement for humanities (3 s.h.). |
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COURSE DESCRIPTIONI designed this course to re-introduce the
idea of leisure to the liberal arts curriculum. We will pay close attention
to the importance of leisure in higher education; as it was dominant in the
Western tradition over a thousand years, as it experienced a resurgence
earlier in this century, and as it has been eclipsed for over fifty years by
education and learning mainly as work and for jobs. The course explores the
theme of culture as an autotelic, or leisure activity as it has
appeared and reappeared in Western art and literature. The course explores
books, films, poems, and dialogues that have suggested that leisure is the
foundation of education and artistic creation and cultural creation and preservation.
Assignments include Plato's Dialogues, twentieth century utopian novels,
films, documentaries, and essays. The class also explores the recent elevation of work and trivialization of leisure. The class investigates how the meanings of "work" and "leisure" have changed in this century, have literally reversed, using Hunnicutt's writings about workers in Battle Creek, Michigan. After investigating leisure's decline and work's ascent, the course begins to explore what the Liberal Arts College calls, "the nature... of human values and value systems in art, literature, philosophy, and religion." In simple language, we will focus on what could and should be done now. The teachers will ask the class: Should common leisure, as most people in the United States experience it, be an important concern for the liberal arts curriculum? and How could liberal arts courses, such as this one, prepare for modern leisure? As a basis for this discussion, we will use the lists of readings and viewings in the assignments and reading lists. The class will read Joseph Pieper's Leisure The Basis Of Culture, a book that extols the human values of autotelic activities such as charity/volunteerism and celebration/worship. I have also included other works such as Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac that describes a "land ethic" and recommends the direct experience and celebration of nature (primarily as outdoor recreation), and Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers that argues for empowerment of individuals through the democratic practice of writing as an autotelic, self-discovering activity. Part of the course, then, attempts to find practical ways for students to use their humanities training and liberal arts education during their ordinary leisure, outside work and career, and freed from "professionals." The course concentrates on the major, general skills gained by a liberal arts education; reading, writing, artistic forms, music, art, dance, community and culture, memory, imagination and creating, playing and appreciating. Part of the course is devoted to the search for leisure uses of liberal arts and the humanities, and to practice in using such skills during ordinary free time and in ordinary places. I am convinced that it is not enough to follow the College of Liberal Arts' guideline for course such as this one, to simply "explore the nature of artistic forms and of human values." The university has too long been content to be a sort of travel guide, simply showing the artistic creations and patterns of meaning found in other times and other culture to the passive, student-as-observer. Going beyond the university-as-tour-guide approach, the course seeks to challenge the student to integrate into their own lives those artistic forms, human values, and liberal arts skills their courses explore. In this regard, Leisure and the Liberal Arts follows the lead of professors in Leisure Studies who have emphasized the value of life-time sports and PE skills. For years many in our field have suggested that the university must challenge the dominant cultural pattern of passively watching sports, by teaching students sports skills that they may take with them when they leave the university, and by emphasizing the importance of actually doing sports in communities. This course seeks to apply these ideas about the value of skills that have a life-time use to the humanities and the liberal arts. The course seeks to develop a taste for doing the liberal arts and humanities by opening up discussion about free places, outside work, career, and the domain of "the professional," where art, value creation, and language; in short the humanities, can be regained and what Jurgen Habermas call the "collapse of the discussional" might be reversed. COURSE WRITER/INSTRUCTORBenjamin K. Hunnicutt. REQUIRED BOOKSPlato, Phaedrus Joseph Pieper, Leisure The Basis Of Culture B.F. Skinner, Walden Two Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers When assigned, other readings will either be put on the class WEB page or put on reserve at departmental library; E141 Field house, and may include;
Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline, "Plato on Leisure, Play, and Learning," Leisure Sciences, VOL. 12, 1990, pp. 211-227. Hunnicutt, B.K. "The End of Shorter Hours," Labor History, XXV (SUMMER, 1984), pp. 373-404. Hunnicutt, B.K. "Are We All Working Too Hard?: No Time for God or Family," The Wall Street Journal (N.Y.), January 4, 1990. Hunnicutt, B.K. "The Death of Kellogg's Six-Hour Day: An Aborted Capitalist Vision of Liberation Through Management of Work Reduction," Business History Review (edited and published by Harvard University School of Business Administration), Sept. 1993. E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past And Present. Robert Hutchins, "The Value of the Museum," and "Introduction" to the first volume of The Great Books Of The Western World. Irving Babbitt, selections. Keynes, "Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren," Essays In Persuasion. Society for the Reduction of Human Labor, Newsletters. |
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