Bringing Scholé Back to School
By: Dr. Christopher Perrin
Scholé (sko-LAY) is a Greek word that defies translation into a single English word. It is most often translated as “leisure,” but that connotes “recreation” and “vacation,” which misleads us. We might say “leisurely learning,” but then we are using two words, and still much is left out. Scholé means something like undistracted time to study the most worthwhile things with good friends, usually in a beautiful place, and usually with good food and drink. It has a range of meaning because scholé is at the same time a disposition of the teacher and student, an atmosphere or setting, and an activity. It was at the heart of our understanding of what education was for about 2,000 years up until about 1900, when education was replaced by the progressive, modern “education” we have today.
Scholé is a word at the root of our English word school, yet ironically, there is no longer much scholé in our schools. In fact, there is a critical problem in education and teaching: modern education is filled with anxiety. How can we remove this anxiety from our students’ learning? By recovering the traditional educational ideal of scholé and with practical solutions for bringing scholé back into our schools. There is an alternate path to modern education, another way to educate children that is not rife with stress and anxiety—it is the scholé way. The scholé way is the way that many have followed and traveled for centuries. While it is old, it is always fresh and ever renewing, because it harmonizes with and is ordered to human nature, to how humans learn.
Dr. Christopher Perrin’s new book, The Scholé Way, published by Classical Academic Press, offers practical suggestions to help teachers bring restful learning or scholé to students by modeling it, embodying it, and creating the conditions for it.