With a focus on all work and no play, our current state education system is failing an alienated generation. Guy Standing proposes a philosophical revolution in the classroom

For too long, education has been overtaken by the idea of “instrumental schooling” – i.e. the reduction of learning to a mere tool for achieving economic ends – a system which is failing children. It’s time to switch the focus to something closer to the ideals of the ancient Athenian philosophers. Education for them was about the pursuit of truth (paideia), in which love of the pursuit was important. Education was also about the refinement of moral character (arete). As Hegel was to put it in 1820, it was: “the art of making men ethical”.

The Athenians understood the need for citizens to allocate as much time as possible to schole, which meant a combination of education and public participation in the life of the polis. Of course, they were living in a sexist society based on slavery, which we rightly deplore. But philosophically they had a more sophisticated understanding of time than is typical today, when leisure simply means little more than time in consumption and recreation, when not in the workplace. For them, the pursuit of education was a purpose of human life, not merely a means to earning money or becoming more competitive than the “less educated”.

Inherently, education is a public good, as economists use that term, in that you having it should not deprive me from having it. Tragically, the idea of education as a commons – a zone of sharing and extending knowledge together – has been eroded. It has become a private commodity, in that if you can gain, by having better credentials from passing more exams than I did, you probably gain an economic advantage over me.

What passes for public education in the UK these days has become largely instrumental for the vast majority. An industrial mentality has prevailed: a treadmill has been constructed, from cradle to grave, with formal assessments beginning as early as four. Adult professional workers are now routinely sent on endless Continuous Professional Development courses. A Human Resource expert tells the Financial Times that everybody should devote 15 per cent of their time every year to retraining. One’s box of tricks can never be big enough!

Meanwhile, children and young adults in Britain are suffering from a peculiarly modern pandemic that should be called examinitus. An incredible amount of time in school is spent taking tests, bouts of tension with the spectre of failure mocking young people as they look at themselves in the early morning mirror. It is no wonder that a quarter of all teenagers leave school loathing learning. By contrast, in Finland children and teenagers have no exams at all, and they are far happier and emerge from school more learned.

There has also been a collapse in what is called deep reading – that is, reading intensely for pleasure. Nearly half of all college students say they only read if they have to do so, up from 36% in 2000. Britain is not alone here, since a majority of OECD countries report a decline in literacy over the past decade.

Quietly, all levels of education have become dominated by global finance, particularly by private equity, which seeks short-term profit maximisation and which is intent on inducing more people to spend more time and money on the pursuit of credentials with commercial relevance. Get ahead!

This leads us back to the need to rescue education and to recognise the role of idling in that endeavour. Some history would help. The ancient Athenians, in particular Aristotle, and later the Stoics, understood the value of aergia, literally translated as idleness. To become and to remain a cultured educated citizen, one needed to be able to allocate quality time to aergia, in order to reflect, to contemplate, to observe, to listen. These are life skills too easily neglected and left undeveloped by all the noise and incessant pressures bombarding us. To be educated, we should be able to release the stress of preoccupying demands on our time.

This was captured beautifully by Cato over 2,500 years ago, when he sent his aphorism down the ages: “Never is a man more active than when he does nothing.” It is the wisdom caught by Seneca’s saying “withdraw into yourself as far as you can” and echoed by Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations. Which in turn should remind us of the wisdom of Bertrand Russell, who extolled the desirability of periods of boredom for children as the stimulus for imagination and creativity.

The ancient Athenians made a distinction between labour – activity done for income or for others – and work – activity done with one’s relations and friends. They also made a distinction between recreation – activities done for physical and mental fitness – and leisure, the latter captured by the word schole, from which we have derived school, scholar and scholastic. Both distinctions must be recovered. We need recreation and relaxation, obviously, but that is not the same as leisure.

Schole was not about making money or becoming more competitive than others. Education was to prepare the citizen for being political in a broad sense, and above all to understand and display empathy. Pericles in about 450 BC introduced payments for the poor so that they could attend the great tragedies and comedies in the theatre, as a means of learning empathy, on the grounds that otherwise they would not be able to afford the time to attend them.

The academy that Plato set up in Athens in 387 BC, when he was 41, was intended to teach the values of empathy and citizenship, based on Socratic dialogue among equals. After Plato died 40 years later, the academy lasted another 433 years, before closing when its orchard was destroyed. Later, as religious dogma took over, the Christian Roman Emperor Justinian suppressed the teaching of philosophy in AD 529.

But the academy ideal never died, even though the subsequent state enclosure of teaching in schools and colleges was based on the authoritarian tradition of the young being told what to think, rather than on how to think. This has been taken to an extreme in the 21st century, with a narrowly defined curriculum, numerous tests and exams and an intensification of schooling.

The Athenians also understood that real education and a healthy democracy depended on two education practices. The first was isogoria, the equal freedom to speak, to think and to be heard. Without that, democracy would trend towards rule by the powerful, a tyranny. And it depended on parrhesia, the ability to speak truth to power without fear of retribution. Encouraging parrhesia in children’s education was regarded as the way to reach matthesis –the acquisition of moral and ethical thinking skills. Today, these principles have been sacrificed as schooling becomes solely oriented to preparing youth as human capital.

That aside, one of the ironies is that, while many think we have more leisure than in the past, the young actually have much less. But as the duration of schooling has grown – starting at an earlier age, ending at a later one, with more days in school per year and more hours per day – something strange has been happening. There has been a well-documented long-term decline in creative, imaginative and innovative thinking.

This is linked to the substantial decline in the amount of time children and teenagers have for unstructured play. There is now a condition known as play-deprived childhood, which is linked to pathological aggression in adulthood. Physical activity, especially outdoors, increases the ability to learn and concentrate. Lack of play has been associated with depression, ADHD and suicidal tendencies. Yet play continues to be restricted.

For instance – and it is not alone – one misnamed academy school, the Thomas Deacon in London, which is the most expensive and largest in Britain costing £46.6 million to build, has no playground at all. Headmaster Alam McMurdo stated: “We are not intending to have any play time. Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored.” Productivity and efficiency first!

In early 2026, it was revealed that the two government departments responsible for funding physical education classes in schools were considering plans to slash their budgets. Apparently, there is opposition to what Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has proposed. But the mooted plans go with what the Prime Minister said before the General Election in 2024, that they would “modernise the curriculum so that it better prepares students for the world of work.’”

There are plenty of other morbid symptoms of a system geared to the production of human capital to suggest all is not well. Research has shown that by reducing the teaching of the humanities, history and culture in the interest of job-enhancing subjects induces more people to support extremist politics in adulthood. Reflect on that, redundant history teachers.

Rescuing education from schooling is an existential challenge. We need to restore something closer to an education commons, with more emphasis on the ethics of empathy, compassion, social solidarity and conviviality. And play!

In short, we need a campaign for Slow Education, alongside one for Slow Time and Slow Food. Education should give priority not only to the refinement of empathy for our fellow human beings but to our connectivity to the natural world. In doing so, we will see a revival of the principles that the Athenians recognised as essential for proper education.

This article draws on Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons by Guy Standing (Pelican, £12.99).

The above piece is from Idler #111.

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