Discover the classical concept of scholé—education as a pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty over productivity. Shift your homeschool focus.
What does scholé even mean?
Pieper’s seminal work, Leisure, the Basis of Culture opens with this:
The Greek word for leisure (scholé) is the origin of Latin scola, English school. The name for the institutions of education and learning mean “leisure.”
The classical ideal for education, which culminated in philosophy, was that its goal was truth-seeking, not profit-earning. To be pursuing education, philosophy, or theology was to be at leisure, because one was not concerned with productivity, profit, or politics.
We think now of education being a different sort of work – intellectual work – but still work, partly because most moderns only have two categories: productive work and unproductive amusement – or, useful and not-useful.
School, in our minds, fits into the productive work category, which leads us to emphasize results, production, and checklists.
To the ancient mind, scholé was about pursuing truth and losing oneself in the process. The category was broken down less along productive/unproductive lines, but along self-oriented and truth-oriented.
To be out working in the world was to be pushing your own goals forward; to be seeking scholé was to set your own agendas and goals aside for the sake of seeing, experiencing, and seeking truth.
Scholé means seeking Truth, Goodness, and Beauty first and foremost, laying aside personal agendas, prideful goals, and desires to control so that we can be open and able to embrace Truth, Goodness, and Beauty when we see it.
And we should be seeing it all over the place. God is True, Good, and Beautiful, and we are reflections of Him, called to increase our reflection of Him more and more as we mature and grow all our lives.
So is our focus in our day-to-day homeschools about achieving our own ends or about encountering Truth, Goodness, and Beauty? It might look exactly the same in method, but it is the motives and the priorities – the heart – that is different.
In his lectures and webinars, Christopher Perrin applies scholé in such a relatable and inspiring way; really, this video is what triggered conversations and connections among us that ended up launching this site.
If you haven’t watched it, please take the time to do so now, especially if you’ve wondered what we’re about here.
Click through to CAP’s YouTube channel to see the next 3 parts to that lecture.
This is Perrin and Sarah Mackenzie:
And this is Restoring Scholé to School:
Where do you see scholé in your homeschool?
Do not despise the small moments.
Find some camaraderie with likeminded homeschool moms. Listen to the Scholé Sisters:
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