ABSTRACT
Technological advance and automation, they asserted, would require higher levels of skill and, contrary to popular belief, would not lead to high levels of unemployment. The unemployed are held to be blameworthy, to be lazy, and to be scroungers on the welfare state who live at the expense of decent people who work for a living. The concept of education as leisure covers a wide range of ideas. At one extreme is the use of secondary schools and adult and further education as a convenient and relatively cheap method of ‘mopping up’ the embarrassingly high youth unemployment figures, in the hope that the problem can be solved when the recession has ended, or at least postponed until later. Any education for leisure worthy of the name must draw upon and develop skills in pupils whilst they are at school; the teacher becomes the facilitator of social organization, not its designer and director.
