On Being a Radically Idle Student

Life can look bleak for the student of the arts and humanities. The cult of employability not only needles them for not having pursued a more economically rational choice of subject but also seeks to ensure their experience of education is mediated by the constant need to relate everything to the world of work. No longer is education allowed to be an end in itself, pursued for the joy of learning and the formulation of a whole human, it must be economically as well as academically productive. To reject this agenda, and pursue an education for its own sake in an age of austerity is a radical act. It takes courage but it is possible to take on the mantle of idleness and pursue an education of leisure. One of the first steps is to root out the pejorative connotations of idleness as an activity.

When I talk of idleness I don’t mean laziness (although that’s not inherently bad either), rather idleness represents a rejection of the need to be an economically useful and productive person. Growing your own vegetables, though hard work, can be an idle activity because you don’t have to work in a paid job to earn money to buy vegetables from the supermarket. The idle student can work hard on their studies but that work isn’t economically valuable. Seen from the narrow view of the economist the study of philosophy or art history or literature is use-less unless it can be harnessed in some way to make someone more productive or more employable.

Choosing to reject this notion of education means pursuing use-less knowledge because you believe that knowledge is either beautiful or worthy of study for its own sake or something toward which you feel naturally drawn. The radically idle student must overcome the feelings of guilt which are deeply ingrained within our collective consciousness by the Protestant Work Ethic. Weber’s arch-Puritan Richard Baxter is the voice in the distance asking us why we are wasting our time.

“If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to accept His gifts and use them for Him when He requireth it”

This sentiment is so dangerous because it has been transferred into our secular age wholesale. You can remove God from it but you don’t remove its power. We feel the need to be useful, productive and self-sustaining even if it’s not an omnipresent God who judges us but our friends and family. ‘Choosing the less gainful way’ is a radical act and, frankly, there’s not a much clearer illustration of that choice than choosing to study philosophy over physics.

All of this might strike you as selfish or anti-social but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Students who pursue a humanities or arts education for its own sake are able to act as the great mediators of our age. Instead of being concerned with action, profit and progress at all costs they are able to step back and see a wider view of the world. Goethe famously said that:

“I have never bothered or asked in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognised as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result”.

The function of higher education need not be to provide a fifteen-minute tea-break at the beginning of adult life to enable someone to work a ten hour shift. It can be the way in which a whole person, and a whole society, is made. Choosing to be a radically idle student is not just a personal statement of beliefs but a statement about the value of thought, contemplation and education in the world we live in. Bertrand Russell wrote about this in 1935 and yet, because we have ignored it so consistently, it is still relevant today.

“The world is suffering from intolerance and bigotry, and the from the belief that vigorous action is admirable even when misguided; whereas what is needed in our very complex modern society is calm consideration, with readiness to call dogmas into question and freedom of mind to do justice to the most diverse points of view”