Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life

Boredom is an enduring problem. In response, schools often do one or both of the following: first, they endorse what novelist Walker Percy describes as a 'boredom avoidance scheme,' adopting new initiative after new initiative in the hope that boredom can be outrun altogether, or second, they compel students to accept boring situations as an inevitable part of life. Both strategies avoid serious reflection on this universal and troubling state of mind. In this book, Gary argues that schools should educate students on how to engage with boredom productively. Rather than being conditioned to avoid or blame boredom on something or someone else, students need to be given tools for dealing with their boredom. These tools provide them with internal resources that equip them to find worthwhile activities and practices to transform boredom into a more productive state of mind. This book addresses the ways students might gain these skills.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; 1. The morality of boredom and a brief history of leisure; 2. The problem of boredom; 3. Despair: The source of boredom; 4. Leisure: A cure for boredom; 5. The art of leisure; 6. Cultivating leisure; Epilogue: Coda on the self at leisure; Bibliography.

About the Author :
Kevin Hood Gary is a Professor of Education at Valparaiso University. His primary areas of interest include philosophy of education, ethics, and moral formation. He is co-founder of the North American Association for Philosophy of Education (https: //www.naape.org/), which provides a hospitable space for scholars working at the intersection of philosophy and educational thought. Kevin recently completed a four-year term as the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities at Valparaiso University. He is currently a Pedagogy Fellow with the Pedagogy of Christ & Being Human project, sponsored by the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

Review :
'… [this] important and insightful book challenges readers to consider the moral and practical dimensions of boredom so that we might educate for lives of meaning. He gathers a range of sources from across time, traditions, and disciplines, and he puts these in conversation with our everyday experiences of boredom in the modern world, while also exploring ways that boredom has been written about and experienced in the past. It is an excellent book.' Jeff Frank, Philosophical Inquiry in Education 'Why Boredom Matters is one of those delightful books in which the author seamlessly draws from thinkers from across multiple disciplines such as education, theology, philosophy, literature, and pop culture. Søren Kierkegaard, Walker Percy, David Wallace Foster, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Dewey, Albert Bormann, Simone Weil, Josef Pieper, St. Benedict, Groundhog Day, and The Karate Kid all contribute to a richer understanding of boredom.' Elizabeth Amato, Law & Liberty '[This] is a significant and welcome book, and one hopes that it will be read and discussed by many in these troubled times … Gary's book is a critical warning and admonition to contemporary society.' Henry T. Edmondson III, The University Bookman 'Gary's book served as an exercise and an apprenticeship in leisure that helped me to practice it as I read and has kept me inspired … The book is focused yet full of quite a lot of ideas and it never feels rushed. Gary moves between a broad range of thinkers from different disciplines with a care and attentiveness that introduces me as a reader to someone and their ideas in a manner that allows me to really talk with them.' Cara Furman, Studies in Philosophy and Education 'I take Gary's contribution to the scholarly literature on boredom as a welcome invitation to culturally, geographically, and contextually wider representations of boredom and leisure to irrigate our minds to the possibilities of constructively and creatively responding to situational and existential boredom. I hope that scholars far and wide look to this book as an example of an inquiry that takes an enduring facet of the schooling experience and responds to it, not with further constraints, but as an opening of the question to spur the exploration of leisurely ways of being.' Vikramaditya (Vik) Joshi, Studies in Philosophy and Education '… a text full of wise insights into how to live one's life.' René V. Arcilla, Studies in Philosophy and Education