(Picking up where we left off in Preparing for Time)
Hutchins’ fundamental motivation and goal was simple – to refuse to do the impossible, which to him was giving in to government and societal pressure to educate for jobs. He simply would not accept that a laissez-faire, pecuniary economy could successfully and meaningfully drive the development of curriculum in higher education institutions. Rather than developing professionals and job seekers, Hutchins was devoted to developing informed, democratic citizens capable practicing leisure rightly.[1]
To do so, he set out to refocus the curriculum at the University of Chicago. Rather than incorporating the latest educational trend (project-based learning!) or job training program (entrepreneurship!), Chicago would instead return to the classics via the “Great Books”– students would be expected to tackle the “permanent questions” of human life by debating the meaning of original ideas through direct encounters with the primary texts of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dante, Newton, Freud, and others. For example, what does it mean to be free? What is justice and how should rules be developed? Are all humans equal, and if so, in what sense?
Hutchins also revamped the timeline of a traditional undergraduate degree. Rather than forcing the four-year timeline, students could graduate in two years or less: they were told what they needed to know, how to go about learning it, and were free to pursue this knowledge at their own pace, reading on their own under the direction and guidance of professors who led Socratic-style discussions rather than traditional lectures. When they felt they were ready, they could take comprehensive, general, college-board exams testing their mastery of entire fields (such as humanities, natural sciences, etc.) instead of earning credit for individual classes. In this way, students were assessed on their depth of integrated understanding, not their short-term ability to memorize information from individual classes. Upon graduation, students were encouraged to either move on with their professional lives, and the “real education as adults within their communities,” or to pursue additional professional education with established university presence, such as law or medicine.[2]
Though this structure was successful – Hutchins and his deans tracked student performance on national examinations and the curriculum was used as a model for liberal arts at other colleges – his approach and personality certainly invited criticism. His non-traditional approach to higher learning, particularly the shortened timeline, tempted other institutions to discount Chicago’s legitimacy, while Hutchins’ personal (and occasionally outspoken) views on wealth redistribution and international relations opened the door to McCarthy-era comparisons to socialism. Worst of all for a man in 20th century America, his removal of varsity football from the University of Chicago was viewed as sacrilege (he viewed major collegiate, profit-making and mass-consumerist athletics as a distraction to higher learning). Despite and perhaps because of these criticisms, Hutchins continued his quest to educate free people the arts and skills of living free as democratic citizens in an era of plenty.
His next project, after leaving the University of Chicago in 1951, would advance his desire to promote education as a lifelong engagement, particularly amongst adults. Like William Ellery Channing, he agreed that “the object of education is to prepare for more education” and was committed to establishing the conditions in which any adult – not just the elite – could engage meaningfully with the most important questions from the Western tradition on humanity and citizenship.
One of the main reasons for his commitment to this endeavor was his underlying philosophy that progress, through freedom, advanced in three stages.
“We want to be free for the sake of doing [and being] something that can cannot be or do unless we are free…. We [first] want our private and individual good, our economic wellbeing. We want food, clothing and shelter, and a chance for our children. Second, we want the common good, [which is the proper role of government]: peace, order, and justice. But most of all we want a third order of good, our personal or human good. We want, that is to achieve the limit of our moral, intellectual, and spiritual powers. This personal, human good is the highest of all goods we seek.”
He, like Keynes, saw technological development (and unemployment) as irreversible and viewed our attempts to educate for jobs as futile. Furthermore, this job displacement was perceived not as a negative, but as a sign of progress and an opportunity to take on the third stage of progress previously noted: the pursuit of happiness, on our own time, pushing the limits of our “moral, intellectual, and spiritual powers” in a condition free of necessity, for their own sake. The government had a moral responsibility to protect and promote these higher uses of individual freedom, those found beyond politics and the marketplace, rather than giving in to the temptation to serve the advance of the economy within a narrow economic rationalization of life.
Instead of creating more work, often make-work, into eternity, government could instead “accept and support the coming new freedom, funding schools, libraries, museums, parks, community centers, nonprofit organizations, adult educational facilities, and other parts of the public sector that would serve the new leisure as it grew.” (136 FT). Education for freedom, education for leisure, was the true path of progress, and learning to use our newfound leisure rightly was the supreme challenge of the future. To inadequately prepare for this challenge would be to give in to the one of the greatest dangers of our time: that of “terminal boredom,” which in turn reflected “the great paradox of our time: The trivialization of life.” These risks had disproportionally higher effects on adults.
“Without purpose, without faith, [adults] will become the victims of universal boredom as leisure and life lengthen. Adult education is necessary to save them from the suicidal tendencies that boredom eventually induces. Television and the comic book, though they are sufficiently shocking, are no longer sufficient to arouse them.” (136 FT)
In addition, without sufficient purpose, challenge, or substance to their day to day lives, and without significant and meaningful “use of their heads,” adults could go a bit crazy – “they will cease to be rational animals” and may fall prey to “skillful propaganda” from “tyrants and demigods.” However, perhaps they might become so bored with mainstream entertainment, and so nauseous from entertainers attempting increasingly brazen stunts and narratives and plots to retain attention, that they “would turn in desperation and revulsion to active, community forms of recreation” instead.
To combat the “terminal boredom” which threatened every working-age adult with little to no access to meaningful education after the age of twenty-one, and to actively and meaningfully absorb the increasing leisure time that would presumably arrive in the near future, Hutchins and fellow philosopher Mortimer Adler launched the Great Books of the Western World series to the public. Similar to the University of Chicago undergraduate program of the same name, the goal was simple: to allow adults to educate themselves by reading the original works of our greatest thinkers with the opportunity to debate them in small, community discussion groups organized and led by volunteer moderators.
Hutchins and Adler believed that literate adults could read and interpret the primary texts without the need for a priest or scholarly academic to provide verbal or written summaries. The books raised perennial questions, not answers, and therefor were intended to inspire discussion and debate in the form of interpretation, application and meaning, rather than formal lecture, examinations or evaluations. Additionally, Adler’s masterpiece was the Synopticon, “an index of hundreds of history’s great ideas, or questions, for the groups to use as a reference to the primary texts and related authors in which each of the ideas, or questions, were addressed.”[3] Discussion prompts were provided by the Synopticon, and groups reportedly would test the ancient ideas through discussion of current personal, community, or national and world events.
Furthermore, the education was simple, affordable, and therefor incredibly accessible. For the simple price of the books themselves (initially sixty cents from the Great Books Foundation), the groups could become self-sufficient under a volunteer moderator, a leader who was “not there to tell what he knows, but to get the members of the group to talk as intelligently and logically as possible about the books.”
In the mid-1960s, within ten years of the Great Books 54-volume set publication, Encyclopedia Britannica reported over 1 million volumes sold. Time, in 1962, stated that “no enterprise in the United States had been more successful in ‘cashing in’ on the fact that adults with ‘more leisure and bored with the regular fare on TV, were looking for something more substantial.’”[4]
Though there is no single movement as centrally organized as the Great Books Program, and though Hutchins passed away in 1977, examining the legacy of his reform efforts – and the public response to his educational philosophy – can provide important context when answering the original question posed: if we can accept technological job displacement as progress, and share the uniquely human work which remains, are we ready – individually, collectively, culturally – for increases in this distinctively pure form of freedom, the freedom from necessity?
Most of us can probably agree that the answer is “no.” In addition to the “great silliness of television and consumerism” which plagued labor reform efforts in the early 20th century, our modern ability to justify increased free time is weighed down by even more addictive forms of passive entertainment which may presumably will fill the void, such as the smartphone, social media, streaming services, and gaming. Why would politicians and business leaders fight for shorter work hours when they can assume, rightfully, that this additional time will be wasted in front of a screen?
Furthermore, our understanding of the meaning, purpose and value of classic leisure has eroded over time, weakening and eventually removing it as a central justification for reducing the hours of work. Traditionally, leisure was the opportunity for activity: to apply and extend one’s mental, physical or spiritual capacity voluntarily in activities which from a distance may very well look like work, but are freely chosen and therefore autotelic, serving as their own reward. Leisure, after all, was always best understood as a verb: “to leisure” in the classic sense was “to give vigorous expression to human virtue in activities that are self-contained and satisfying in themselves.” This, practiced habitually, is what defined Aristotle’s eudaimonia (happiness).
Losing the ability to leisure – if we don’t know how to occupy it, work it, or use it rightly – or if we prefer compulsory, paid obligations and passive, digital distractions in its place, is essentially admitting that we are uncomfortable with our most prized possession, that of freedom, and incapable of exercising its most direct corollary, that of free choice.
Shifting this mindset, in which we blindly accept an American economic rationalization of life with work as active, noble engagement, and leisure as the passive, wasteful idleness, will require changes “of the most profound order – in our outlook on life, in our slogans, in our most cherished beliefs, one of the most cherished of which is the doctrine of Salvation by Work.”[5] And just as in the 1920s, one could argue that one of the only ways to achieve this sort of change is through education.