One of the peculiarities of our time is we don’t agree on the purpose of school.

So we often aim for something non-controversial, like job preparation.

Once we do that, we find it easy to stop talking about how schools can provide a place to learn the tools of reasoning, and to practice them.

We stop talking about schools as places of experimentation with ideas, in conversation with others, guided by guardrails of common care and mutual enrichment.

We forget about the delight of playing with tools of discovery like dictionaries and novels and guided time in laboratories.

We turn our attention away from the way writing and reading are like weightlifting for our inner lives.

We think of math and science as tools for professions and forget that they are about helping our minds and our communities reach out and get in touch with the way things are in the cosmos.

So many wonders of language and culture and math and thinking together become boxes to be ticked, grades to be tallied, rungs on a career ladder.

And then it surprises us when we one day find that the play is gone, the wonder and curiosity have been shoved aside as distractions from work, and learning has become a task rather than a privilege to pursue in joyful leisure.

(Our word “school” comes from the Ancient Greek word scholê which means leisure.)

So what is school for?

This is something we ought to spend more joyful leisure discussing in our communities, ideally while breaking bread together, with good music in the background, music and food that make us glad to be thinking together about the children we love, and what will become of their too-short, beautiful lives.