By RJ Snell, Jun 17, 2009 in Musings, Pedagogy and Teaching
Evagrius of Ponticus delares that the monk stricken with sloth begins to hate their place and engages in all sorts of frenzied activity to escape the duties required of them by their place. In an earlier post I wondered if that implied that the current culture of mobility made professors slothful, to their detriment.
Now, might this not make students bored?
Not in the sense of being uninterested—a problem even for Plato, I suspect--but ontologically bored. To be bored in this way is to assume that (1) the world cannot captivate or make demands of my care (sorge) and attention, and (2) subjectivity is such as to be detached, an observer.
If the university and its faculty are detached from the particularities of place and the demands of prudence demanded by locale, isn't the university very likely to form students who are detached, observers from afar, with little proclivity or ability to enter into the concrete? I mean this in Aristotle's sense of experience, for even the young can have abstractions, but experience is local and prudential.
Are we forming students incapable of settling in, of settling down, of settling?
I'd recommend Scruton's News from Somewhere as antidote.
1 Response to "The Bored Student (part 2)"
Gabriel Martinez on Jun 25, 2009
(I'm sure RJ knows this, but for the benefit of the readers) Pieper's "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" is another good read in this context. We make all our freshmen read it before they enroll. At orientation, they get together in small groups with a faculty member and discuss the text. The advice to "be still" and to be on the watch against acedia (restlessness) is one that young people, Millennials or ancient Greeks, have always needed and seldom heeded.