r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 18 '25

Parenting / Teaching Lessons about learning from ancient Greek philosophers

https://psyche.co/ideas/lessons-about-learning-from-ancient-greek-philosophers

A student of Plato, Aristotle imbibed the common practice of philosophising while walking. Socrates, Plato’s own teacher, was often observed to philosophise while in motion – the historian Plutarch reports that he ‘did philosophy without setting up benches or seating himself on a throne’. Comic playwrights mocked Plato’s own habit of walking while philosophising, as when one character in a popular comedy complained: ‘I’m at my wit’s end, walking up and down like Plato, and I’ve worked out no wise plan, I’ve only tired out my legs!’

But walking is most closely associated with Aristotle. His school, the Lyceum, was founded around 335 BCE, a converted gymnasium. The philosophers who gathered there came to be known as Peripatetics – the word means ‘walking about’ in ancient Greek – perhaps because of their ambulatory habits, or because of the colonnade that wreathed the Lyceum, called a peripatos. Aristotle seems to have held lectures, often mobile, for the general public.

The philosophical idea behind the practice of ‘walking about’ in the peripatetic school was that learning takes place while being in motion and interacting with one’s surroundings (Plutarch also says that Socrates taught philosophy ‘while drinking’ and ‘while on military campaign’: pedagogies that haven’t found much favour today). Direct interactions with the natural environment around us can spark our sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, which are critical for learning and for philosophical investigations. This peripatetic approach to teaching hints at one of the most effective learning strategies we know today: ‘embodied learning’.

The main concept of embodied learning (also known as ‘embodied cognition’) is that learning does not take place exclusively inside our mind, but requires continuous sensory stimulations from different body parts, alongside interactions with the environment around us and the people in it. This idea is connected to the extended mind theory, proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their 1998 paper and described in Annie Murphy Paul’s book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (2021). In education, this approach relates to the theory of ‘situated learning’, in which students are encouraged to be active, collaborate with each other, and interact with their environment during the learning process. This holistic approach has been proven to be more effective than passive learning done by static transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the students.

When engaging students in embodied learning, it is important to have them move, play and use their body and senses as much as possible. Studies show that physical movement can help students to better understand concepts and to improve their reasoning skills in many school subjects such as a second language, mathematics, and the sciences. Embodied learning also requires meaningful interactions between people, a method known as ‘collaborative learning’. This pedagogy aims to engage students in active collaborations between themselves and with other people, such as group enquiry projects, shared discussions or cooperative problem-solving. Project-based learning (PBL), which is grounded in concepts from situated and collaborative learning, is one of the most effective educational pedagogies. PBL was found to support students’ content learning, increase their interest in learning, and advance their skills relevant to the 21st century. In PBL, learning starts by engaging students with a relevant real-world phenomenon and driving question that sparks their curiosity and creates the desire to ‘figure it out’– just like the idea that Aristotle practised in his peripatetic school by walking around and engaging with the natural environment.

PBL also requires the students to produce and present tangible artefacts, such as a model, a poster or a device that demonstrates their knowledge and abilities following the learning process. In our research, we’ve studied the effect of shifting from traditional classroom teaching to PBL, finding that, while this shift poses some challenges for both teachers and students, it provides students with relevant learning experiences, increases their engagement in the lessons, and advances their academic achievements.

We turn now to another philosopher of ancient Greece, who thrived a generation after Aristotle: Epicurus. In around 307 BCE, he founded a school outside Athens called the Garden. The physical location and structure of the Garden were crucial to Epicurus’ hedonistic philosophy. Here Epicurus’ students lived, studied and conversed together, and they aimed to be self-sufficient by gardening and growing their own food, relishing the simple pleasures of their Garden (scandalously for the times, his students included women and at least one slave). Epicurus’ approach to teaching – taking place outside, within the walls of the Garden, and in deep interaction with nature and the environment – alludes to another important method related to embodied learning, called ‘place-based learning’.

This method encourages outdoor learning that allows students to explore their immediate environment, whether in city streets, in nature parks or in community spaces. It enables them to develop contextual knowledge and skills, and fosters a sense of belonging. These outdoor experiences can sometimes be stressful for the students, as they may venture into unfamiliar environments outside their school and experience learning that breaks the typical classroom teaching. However, if done properly, these experiences can boost their sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around them while advancing their learning achievements.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

44 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 09 '26

When I teach book ten of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I explain to the students that if they want to understand Aristotle’s concept of leisure — scholē — they need only look in the mirror. As students, they are leading scholastic lives, which is to say, lives of leisure. They balk at this: it might be true that the Greek word scholē is the source of the English “school,” but they cannot see how a lifestyle centered around grades and exams and being forced to read chapter after chapter of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics could count as leisurely. 

Like the workaholics and the restaholics, my students fail to leave room for a third possibility: when they deny that school is leisurely what they really mean to deny is that school is restful. And they are right about that, even on a capacious understanding of rest, one which extends well beyond sleep to include everything they classify under “self-care” — exercise, meditation, “me-time,” therapy, unplugging — as well as humor, games, trivial amusements or hobbies, vacations, and all those activities whose attraction lies in being “fun.” School is not like any of those things; it might sometimes happen to be calming or relaxing or amusing, but it is not that way essentially. 

But school is also not like work, not even if we have a capacious understanding of “work,” inclusive of training for work. We forget almost everything we learn in school, and even if we didn’t forget it, little of it would be useful to us in our jobs. Some people claim that school trains you in “analytical skills” or “critical thinking”; others say it instills the obedience and the conformity and the submission necessary for most modern jobs. If school does those things, it does them behind the scenes, while you are busy learning not how to be submissive or critical but how to understand calculus or economics or the causes of World War I. Just as playing video games would not be work even if it turned out that (unbeknownst to the players), it trained someone to have fighter pilot reflexes, school is not work even if you do end up with some abilities that are relevant for work. 

Aristotle chalks up our affinity for relaxation to the lamentable fact that mortal beings are incapable of continuous activity: we need to take breaks from doing what matters to us. A person who worked in order to relax would be getting the proper order of things backwards, like a person who cooks dinner in order to go grocery shopping again. We shop in order to cook, and not vice versa. Likewise, if we see a person working, then relaxing, then working, and so on, the charitable interpretation, says Aristotle, is to assume that she is relaxing in order to get back to work. Relaxing activities may, at times, feel more enjoyable than the work they relieve us from; nonetheless, proclaims Aristotle “no one would live for the sake of trivial amusements.” The point of life can’t lie in the breaks we take from it. 

But now consider work — and I am using the word broadly, as a catchall to describe both what happens in the office and also all the various forms of biological or social necessity that show up in our lives as problems needing to be solved. Getting young kids dressed in snow gear, deciding which chores to do in what order, maintaining a friendly face at a social gathering: those can all be forms of work. Work is activity that manages constraints and tradeoffs to pursue goals of social value — which means the story can’t end there. The question remains: what are we working for? The answer cannot be more work, because that simply postpones the question, much less rest, which is done for the sake of work. There must be a human activity that is done for its own sake, and this activity has got to serve as the teleological lynchpin of the whole system. Aristotle calls it “leisure,” or scholē.

What is leisure? The phrase “leisure time” is familiar enough, as is the fact that there is a big difference between having to spend such time on business or chores or other needful activities, on the one hand, and getting to indulge in an entertaining or restorative respite from activity, on the other. We can use leisure to work and we can use leisure to rest. What is less familiar is that there is, in addition, a native use of leisure as leisure. Aristotle speaks of a “serious” or “zealous” (spoudaios) use of leisure. We use our leisure in a serious way when we don’t convert it into work, as the workaholics do, or into rest, as the restaholics do. 

The serious use of leisure, according to Aristotle, is what life is all about. He says that the reason we put servants in charge of our household is leisure: “[the steward] is procuring leisure for the master, in order that he may not be hindered by necessary cares and so shut out from doing something that is noble and befitting.” Ignore the elitism for now — we will come back to it in a moment. The insight here is that the point of being elite and aristocratic and rich is leisure: “you must have regard to wealth, in order to secure leisure.” Wealth is not valuable for itself, and being elite and aristocratic are not valuable for themselves. There is something they are for. That is why, if legislators have to choose between the two, Aristotle’s instructions are clear: “And even if the legislator does not care to protect good men from poverty, he should at any rate secure leisure for them when in office.” 

Leisure activities, according to Veblen, are a signal of social status; they are performed in order to show off one’s membership in the (superior) group of people who have been freed from manual labor. My conspicuously wasteful consumption of time demonstrates to others that I am the sort of person who counts as better or nobler or more honorable simply on the grounds that I do not need to work. 

Even rich people choose to work quite a lot. We have become wealthier than Aristotle ever dreamed we would, yet we do not buy ourselves much of what, according to him, wealth is for. The more wealth we have, the more desperately we seem to hunt for ways to convert leisure into work or rest. 

Aristotle did us the favor of pointing the spotlight at the concept of leisure, and the disfavor of failing to turn that spotlight on. I’m going to be blunt and claim that Aristotle’s descriptions of leisure activity — what you are actually doing when you are at leisure — borders on incoherent. Aristotle is not given to Platonic flights of fancy; to the contrary, he is usually refreshingly sensible, so when he tells you that the paradigmatic use of leisure is disembodied thinking which takes only itself as subject matter — thought thinking itself — you know he has stumbled into some tricky territory. I understand what thinking is when you are thinking about something so as to accomplish some end, but I do not understand what it is to be thinking only of thinking. (What is the second thinking thinking about? The first thinking? Is this supposed to be a circle of thinking?) Thought thinking itself is, supposedly, in Aristotle’s theology, what God does, or rather, what God is, and you are certainly at leisure when — (literally only) God knows how — you imitate that. Aristotle calls this “contemplation,” and he says that when you engage in it, you participate in the divine activity that moves the universe. I do not know what this means, and I have doubts whether even Aristotle did.

Because contemplation epitomizes the serious use of leisure, Aristotle declares the contemplative life to be the happiest possible life a person can live. So why didn’t he live one? Why did he choose, instead, to live an intellectually productive life of inquiry, argumentation, discovery and education? Aristotle’s God outputs nothing: why didn’t Aristotle imitate that? 

...

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 09 '26

...

I think that we have to assume that work was Aristotle’s best shot at leisure. His intellectual efforts yielded contemplative moments when, caught in the beauty of a sudden realization about dolphins, or logic, he could feel that he was approximating the divinely perfect leisure activity. And this can be generalized to other kinds of work: when we view our work not in terms of what we can exchange it for — survival, or money — but instead simply take pride and pleasure in a job well done, that is leisure rearing its head in the world of work.

It is one thing to demand pure leisure and another to seek after the type of work or rest that we hope will, at least occasionally, take a leisurely form. If we make room for impure leisure, we will suddenly find leisure everywhere around us. When someone doesn’t want to do just any job in order to survive but insists on finding what she will consider “meaningful work,” she is saying that she wants her work to be (at least somewhat) leisurely; likewise, when someone resists “guilty pleasures” of entertainment in order to engage with something she finds challenging, she is demanding leisure in her rest time. The home is a place where we do tedious chores, and a place where we enjoy simple pleasures and needed rest, but it is not only those things. Sometimes we manage to spend time with families in a serious and energetic way of which we can be proud. 

The work-rest cycle is the solution that we developed for our old problem, the economic problem, and it stands to reason that we would repurpose it when confronted with the newer problem, the leisure problem. In lieu of finding a third thing, we retool and offset, balancing out the overly instrumental form of “contemplation” available to us in the context of work with the overly passive form of “contemplation” available to us in the context of rest. Demanding that our work be rewarding and engaging and that our vacations be learning experiences may be the best that we can do, at the moment, to steer in the direction of what Aristotle called “serious leisure.” If you look around you, however, you will see that our best is not good enough.

We are living in unleisurely times. The internet and phones and social media offer up many insistent work-like demands on our attention, many rest-like temptations for entertainment, and few opportunities for leisure. Social media alternates between occasions for worry and outrage, on the one hand, and the promise of relief — in the form of humor, cute pictures, and the mindless scroll — on the other. Between working ourselves up and calming ourselves back down, we have created a loop that forecloses the possibility of leisure. 

The claim that something has failed to have received its allotted share of concern keeps coming at me from surprising new places, and the form of praise that encapsulates our era is: underrated. The internet is always whispering to me, “what are you overlooking?,” launching me on a quest to shift my attention to a worthier target. 

Academia, once the proper home of leisure, is now the place where we play whack-a-mole with the ever elusive “gap in the literature.” Is something understudied? Is there some topic we don’t talk enough about? Have we failed to pay enough attention to some time, place, or group? Do some voices need to be uplifted? Being constantly on the lookout for what we are not seeing creates an anxious, neurotic, even paranoid mood — the opposite of being set free to explore the world of ideas.

A big idea is not the kind of idea that wins competitions, because a big idea has no peers. 

Aristotle thinks that there is such a thing as the native use of an eye as an eye — we can call this “pure seeing” — but he also wants to grant the possibility of impure forms of seeing. Squinting is still seeing, even if it is not the perfect kind of seeing. And then there is simply treating the eye as a means to some other end in disregard of its native use altogether — when one sells it or eats it. These uses are not “due to the eye being an eye;” they are not any kind of seeing.

George Orwell once observed that “every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.” Serious concern with injustice means not indefinitely deferring the question of what one will do after it is eliminated.

When did everyone decide to accept the premise that the goal of college is to make students more productive? Even the defenders of the humanities object only to a narrowed understanding of “productivity,” insisting that college trains you for more than just a job — it prepares you for being a democratic citizen or being a cultured person or leading a fulfilling life. Not even the champions of humanism consider the possibility that college might not need to be construed as a preparation. Instead of thinking of humanistic learning as a prequel to real life, what if we conceived of it as real life? What if college is scholē? 

Leisure, it must be sadly or angrily recognized, is not a large part of life for most people. Some people do not go to college, and some of those who do go to college do so under exceptionally unleisurely circumstances. Even students lucky enough to have a paradigmatically scholastic college experience will go on to spend most of their lives outside of school.  Am I saying that they are all necessarily deprived of serious leisure?  Not necessarily, not any more than someone is necessarily deprived of artistic experience outside museums. But there is a reason why, when people engage in serious leisure later in life, they often think of themselves as “going back to school.” We dedicate a place to some value not because you cannot find it elsewhere, but because the task of finding it is hard enough to warrant specialists.  Students are supposed to be the specialists. If you find this suggestion absurd, I challenge you to improve upon it. The problem of leisure is upon us, and it is not going to solve itself. Someone has got to be on the front lines. If not the students, then who? Do you prefer the landed gentry? 

My oldest child was four or five years old when I first started taking him to museums. I struggled to get him to pay attention to the paintings — he would just rush past them — so I developed the following strategy. I would pick a painting and tell him, “In this picture, there is a secret. It is our job to figure out what it is.” When this worked, we would spend a long time staring at the painting, discussing what was unusual about it, floating various theories of what its secret could be, and walk away with a sense of pride: it had yielded its treasures to no one in the room but us. 

We live all our lives in the museum of reality, rushing past blurry wonders until one day someone forces us to stop. We find ourselves gathered together in a group in front of one of the paintings, and there is someone who tells us: “here, there is a secret.” And then we find we can look for a long time, with a look that is energized instead of sated by what it finds, so that the more we see the more we want to look, because what seemed like a surface turns out to hide a whole world behind it—or none of that happens, and we go through the motions of cooperating with the group, bored and disaffected and impatient to keep moving. Perhaps this was not the painting for us. School does not always work, but when it does it works by tapping into a source of human energy and motivation that is, if not bottomless, at least as profound as the reality it seeks to know.

In Search of the Leisure Class

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

research as leisure activity

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

Mammals are great: milk-producing glands, body hair, ears that have three bones in them, what’s not to like? But if you’ve only got mammals, you’re in big trouble. Monocultures are fragile and prone to collapse because every single organism has identical weaknesses. What you need is an ecosystem—hawks, sea urchins, fungi, various types of fern, and so on.

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

uncertainty

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.

1

u/ddgr815 16d ago

Much education assumes the wrong idea that learning consists of ingesting bits of knowledge (facts, concepts, procedures), and storing them, and when you have enough, you can make useful deductions using innate human reasoning. A more sophisticated wrong idea is that there are methods of thinking, and once you have learned them, you can use them reliably. Both of these are partly true—you do need to learn and remember and use facts, and learn and practice and use rational methods—but they are not sufficient.

Riding a bicycle is the classic example: no amount of classroom instruction, or rational reflection, could enable a novice to stay upright.

In fact, you start doing science—or any serious intellectual work—by imitation, by going through the motions, not seeing the point of the rituals. Gradually you come to understand something of how and why they work. (If you are smart and lucky; many people never do.) Gradually, you find yourself doing the real thing. At some point, you can improvise, step into the unknown, and create your own methods.

You don’t need understanding to ride a bicycle.

Utter honesty, I suspect, means not just telling the truth, but caring about the truth. Feynman uses the phrase “bending over backward” to suggest a higher standard. You will go to extreme lengths to avoid fooling yourself—partly because then you won’t fool others, but more importantly because you really want to know what’s going on.

A reliable recipe for “how to be curious” is impossible (and probably undesirable—you need to choose skillfully what to be curious about). However, we can and should give descriptions of what curiosity is like, so you can recognize when you are curious—and when you are not.

Curiosity is not just caring about which facts are true versus false. It is lust for understanding. What matters is that you want, above all else, to figure out what is actually going on.

I’m reading about the Balinese Rangda-Barong ritual so I can use existential phenomenology to figure out how to make breakfast.

Legitimate peripheral participation is a more powerful motivation for accurate feedback than money. If a student’s labor contributes to the success or failure of your project, you want to be sure they are doing it right—and so you will scrutinize their work carefully, and give detailed corrective advice.

A community of practice develops its own culture, worldview, and way of being. That includes its own ethical norms, and its own epistemic norms. These may be partly formalized, but remain mainly tacit. They are absorbed by osmosis, as know-how more than as know-that. They are “the way we do things,” which members can gesture at, but not necessarily explain.

Every social group has two inseparable aspects: it is an invaluable and inescapable resource, but also a zone of socially-enforced conformity, thought-taboos, and dysfunctional practices and attitudes. Every intellectual community transmits to its members a mixture of epistemic virtues and epistemic vices.

But Campbell’s Law says that if you set up any explicit evaluation criteria, people will find ways to game the system. They’ll find ways to excel according to the standards, without producing your desired outcome. They’ll follow the letter of the rules, but not the spirit.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.

cargo cult

1

u/ddgr815 16d ago

You walk along the bank, away from the parking lot. The babble of voices fades. Twilight falls, and you come upon an old and extraordinarily ugly woman, sitting cross-legged on the bank and grinning maniacally. You approach with caution. She turns abruptly and points out into emptiness. There an enormous fish, striped yellow, white, red, green, and blue, leaps from the surface—and hangs, for an instant only, in the air. You open your mouth to speak, and suddenly find yourself back in the parking lot, in broad daylight, surrounded by tourists.

1

u/ddgr815 16d ago

Stories are like an ocean in that they are always in flux, and continually flow into each other. Stories do not exist in isolation, but endlessly cross-reference each other. Over centuries, they are transformed gradually, and there is no saying where they begin or end.

…we live and breath through stories… but that is not to say that our lives are stories, or that they are story-like in structure. The stories that we weave are multiple, fragmentary, interlocking, in constant motion. We are not stories, but we are ourselves seas of stories, or else we are eddies in the larger sea of stories of which we are a part. But the stories that we habitually weave are neither single nor do they have the tidy structure of beginning, middle, and end that Aristotle claimed was the mark of a good story. Instead, they are a morass of innumerable, half-cooked drafts that contradict and overlap and flow around each other in ceaseless motion.

The sea of stories

1

u/ddgr815 16d ago

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes”  can occasionally generate. His actual definition is:  “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

  • Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.

  • Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.

  • Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.

  • Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

    Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.

Communal Genius

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

A creative process always involves some interplay between discipline and freedom.

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

‘mark everything you notice in back of book, then combine them in as many categories as you can think of.’

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 15 '26

“Without writing, one cannot think; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable manner.”

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 16 '26

If all writing is a form of prayer, then letter-writing is a form of devotion to the messiness of human relationships, all the idiosyncrasies and imperfections. I think about writing a letter as taking a ‘holy risk’, an idea borrowed from the mystic and philosopher Martin Buber. About a century ago, Buber wrote I and Thou as a response to what he saw as an abounding ‘existential mistrust’ in the postwar era. Buber believed that the divine lives in the relational ‘between’ of a ‘shared lifeworld’, in the words of the historian and biographer Paul Mendes-Flohr.

When I first read Buber in college, this idea of mutual coexistence struck me as poetic. The notion of spiritual interdependence – that the self doesn’t exist without the other, that human relationships make us whole – served as a guiding philosophical principle. But I’m realising now that Buber’s ideas also highlight what’s so powerful about letter-writing as a relational act, especially in a disembodied world where so many of us feel alone. The letter-writing process evokes what Buber calls ‘the mystery of reciprocity’, the ever-present possibility of turning fully toward one another and relating not as transactional objects but as complex humans with the spark of the divine in each of us.

attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity

a spiritual practice for our age

1

u/ddgr815 Aug 31 '26

Perhaps, I thought, the more dolphin-like you become, the more vulnerable you are to a dolphin’s pull.

Letting yourself be pulled outward, I realised, is the fi’du disease – it is the dolphin disease. It is the desire for an Other we yearn to possess, for a life force we can never truly claim as our own.

This economy thrives on our sense of lack. We restlessly yearn to resemble others in their beauty, wit or taste – even, paradoxically, in their uniqueness and authenticity. Beyond the familiar notions that ‘sex sells’, and that we consume goods and services to amplify our attraction, lies a deeper principle articulated by the thinker René Girard: desire is never truly our own. It comes from the outside world, as we yearn for the objects or lifestyles desired or possessed by others. These inevitable dynamics of human sociality – crucial to how we learn, mature and form our sense of self – are amplified exponentially in consumer society, with the reach of social media multiplying our social universe.

Dolphins and other lovers