Labor, Leisure, and Liberal Education

Essay by Mortimer Adler, orininally published in The Journal of General Education (October 1951).

"In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should like to proceed in the following order: first, to make some approximations to a definition of liberal education in terms of leisure; second, to try to reach a deeper understanding of the significance of this definition by examining more closely the distinctions between work or labor, on the one hand (I shall use the words “work” and “labor” interchangeably), and leisure, on the other; and, third, to draw from this analysis some implications or consequences for the place of liberal education in an industrial democracy like ours."

At The Imaginative Conservative.