Education Means Learning to Use Leisure Time Well

A conversation about the low-tech philosophy of classical education

Me (left) and Anne-Kathleen at leisure in 2017 (photo credit: my mom)

My childhood friend Anne-Kathleen Borushko tells a story about when her oldest child went to kindergarten. When he came home from school she asked him her favorite question: “What book did your teacher read to you today?”

But her son reported that his teacher hadn’t read a book. Instead, the class watched a video in which a disembodied narrator read a book on screen.

This revelation pained her.

It wasn’t that she was opposed to the videos. As a former teacher herself, she knew this series already. “They are well produced, published by Scholastic and narrate classic children’s books,” she said, adding that she even owned several of these videos and had used them to keep her kids busy on long road trips.

“But that's not the same thing as the teacher sitting and reading the book,” she emphasized. “What happens when that human connection is lost?”

Now, almost fifteen years later, she’s the Head of a classical charter school …