Something has shifted in the air this week. The afternoons are longer now, the light is softer and stays later, and the school grounds on both campuses carry that faint green smell of things waking up. Spring has arrived, and with it comes a welcome convergence of beginnings: our summer uniform policy takes effect, the fourth quarter begins, and Spring Break stands just ahead of us. These are small, practical markers on the school calendar, but they point toward something worth pausing to consider.
A pause, in fact, is exactly what I want to commend to you.
The philosopher Josef Pieper wrote, in his short and remarkable book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, that leisure is a condition of the human soul. In Pieper’s words, true leisure is a “receptive stillness” that allows a person to be refreshed, to see clearly again, to re-encounter the world as the gift it is. Pieper was writing in response to the modern tendency to measure all human value in terms of output, to see rest only as a means of recovering so that one can produce more. Against that view, he insisted that leisure is a genuine end in itself. It is the posture from which culture and beauty become possible. That is something to bear in mind.
The school year, by its nature, militates against leisure in this sense. There is always a next assignment, a next assessment, a next meeting, a next obligation. The pace is relentless–for students, parents, teachers, and school leaders all–but it is relentless with good reason. The work of forming young minds and characters does not yield to convenience. But even good and necessary work can, if left uninterrupted, crowd out the things that make the work worth doing. A student who has never had an unhurried afternoon to read for pleasure, or to sit outside and do nothing in particular, is missing something that no curriculum can supply.
So as you move into Spring Break, I want to offer a gentle encouragement rather than a program. Take the week with some seriousness about what it is for. If you can travel, travel well. Stand somewhere unfamiliar and let the world be larger than your usual routine. If you stay home, enjoy the longer spring days. Go outside. Walk without a destination. Let your children be “bored” long enough that they discover they are not, in fact, bored, but merely unaccustomed to stillness—and, yes, leisure. Open a book you have wanted to read. Sit on the porch in the evening. These are not trivial recommendations. They are a defense of something Pieper considered essential to a fully human life. (I shall even try to take my own advice!)
The summer uniforms are a small emblem of this seasonal turn. They are lighter and more suited to the world that is opening outside our classroom windows. They are a reminder that the school year has rhythms, and that these seasonal rhythms matter. We dress for where we are in the year, and where we are right now is that lovely threshold between the long interior season of learning and the open, spacious air of spring and summer.
I am grateful for this community and for the shared conviction that education is about more than work and outcomes. The classical tradition that shapes everything we do here has always known that the contemplative dimension of life is no luxury. Pieper drew on Aristotle and Aquinas to make the case that leisure is the very ground from which culture grows. A school that forms students in the true, the good, and the beautiful is also a school that honors the stillness in which those things are recognized and loved.
So: rest well. Enjoy the break. Enjoy springtime.
Torches Up!
Mr. Rose
Headmaster, Cincinnati Classical Academy
Mr. Michael Rose, Headmaster
Mr. Rose has taught various courses at Brown University, Cincinnati Moeller, and The Summit Country Day School. As a part of his degree work in education, Mr. Rose’s research interests included the Great Books curriculum, the Paideia teaching method, and the “effects of emerging digital technology on student reading, writing, and researching.” Read More