Sobre el Estudio: ocio, melancolía y cuidado

Abstract

The following article proposes to reconsider the notion of study, in contrast to a school (or a university) that, increasingly, defines itself as a place of learning and performance. We begin by opposing two visions of school and two ways of conceiving their fundamental vocation. On the one hand, the school conceived as a place for the cultivation of a way of life, separated from the tasks and obligations that the vital necessities impose. The ancient Greeks called this notion of school, skholé (leisure). On the other hand, the school, proposed by the neoliberal reformers of the eighties, is conceived of as a place of learning where one develops preparatory skills for the labor market. On the one hand, the school as a place of leisure, on the other, the school as a place of learning. With this conception of school in mind, we will develop the following hypothesis: the school was originally, and could continue to be, a place of leisure, but not of any type of leisure, but of a studious leisure. It is precisely in this idle time (otium), where the human being experiences, in a more radical way, his condition of being indeterminate, open to the world and its renewal. For this very reason, leisure is also a dangerous place, threatened by tedium and melancholy. The school must protect leisure so that it does not transform into work or entertainment, but it must also offer the possibility of sustaining a studious leisure, that is, a form of attention and care of the world we inhabit in common. Finally, we will dwell on the notion of study, properly speaking, to consider study as a culture and transmission of those arts and techniques that allow access to the world.