Aristotle's good life: Productivity, leisure, and contemplation

Recently I listened to an episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, "This is your brain on 'deep reading.' It's pretty magnificant." In the episode, Maryann Wolf -- a scholar who studies the neuroscience of reading -- argues we are losing our ability (or, perhaps more accurately: our mindset) to read deeply, in part because we've shifted primarily to become a culture of screen readers rather than print readers. Wolf thinks of "deep reading" as a pinnacle among various types of reading, a kind of reading that she connects with critical analysis, empathy, attentiveness, and insight--and she suggests that a generation of screen readers are not necessarily learning this type of reading. Digital reading, she suggests, encourages skimming, distraction, divided reading. During the episode, she explains:

The affordances of the digital medium, which enhance the speed in which we’re reading and focusing on vast amounts of information, multitasking and being entertained [--] all of that actually takes away from the ability to use the full circuitry — the full circuitry which includes using your background knowledge to infer, to deduce the truth value, to feel what that author is feeling in a work of fiction, to understand a completely different perspective.

Part of the reason she finds this worrisome is that she suggests that, in this shift, we also shift our mindset; reading in a certain kind of way isn't just a change in how we read (or how well we learn as a result), but it may also be shifting us in larger ways as well, ways that include, potentially, loss of attention and loss of insight. 

Later in the episode, she connects these potential losses to Aristotle's notion of a good society:

Aristotle was writing about what makes a good society. And he said there are three lives to a good society. The first life is the life of productivity and knowledge and accrual of information. The second life is, and in the Greek sense, leisure, entertainment. One has to have that. But he said the third life that is essential is the life of reflection. He used the word contemplation. Now [from this Aristotelian perspective,] the contemplative is going missing and we don’t realize how important it is to insight.

I don't entirely agree with Wolf's position on what we are losing in the shift to (or addition of) digital forms of reading. Some of her writing leans towards what Gerald Graff called the "literacy myth," the association of reading and writing with "the triumph of light over darkness, of liberalism [in the emancipatory sense], democracy, and of universal unbridled progress. ... an important part of the larger parcel of factors that account for the evolution of modern societies and states." Graff and others have sensed pushed back on this version of literacy's impact on individuals and communities, and I think their work is compelling--even though it flies in the face of a continuing modern narrative about the value of book reading and logical writing.

But this part about Aristotle, though. It's got me thinking. I don't know that there's an empirical basis for his writing, and it may carry some of the same problematic judgements that are embedded in the literacy myth. But, I wonder what it would mean to organize a school, or a program, or a course, around these "three lives." What would it look like to build a technical writing course that asked students to think about the role of technical documents not only in productivity but also in leisure and contemplation? What would it look like to balance student reading and writing across these lives--what, even, would a "leisurely" reading or writing task look like in a technical writing? (One option might be viewing and discussing Office Space; what can this kind of entertainment tell us about technical communication?). 

I think there has been a willingness (and a pressure) to foreground the life of productivity in education at the expense of leisure and of contemplation. Currently, sitting on a committee to revise my university's general education committee, I listen to some colleagues complain that their accreditation requirements constrain their curricula so narrowly that finding room for even 12 credits of exploratory coursework is too great a burden. Can't we find a space for both/and? What evidence do we have (really, what evidence?) that unyielding focus on productivity and knowledge and accrual of information is better than an alternative? Or, phrased more positively: what evidence do we have that spending time on contemplation, especially, might support other goals in education? More importantly, how can we reduce the sense that the productive life is isolated from the other lives? And, where do individuals learn contemplation and leisure?