The praise of learning for its own sake as necessary for a flourishing life is often charged with displaying an aristocratic bias, as if aristocratic Aristotle’s endorsement was the kiss of moral death, as if a truth could not be tangled up with moral ugliness. But the accounts I alluded to of the destruction of leisure in the lives of modern workers, the diminishment of their humanity, ought to make us more alive to the value of leisure, not less. Hearing such stories, we ought to be motivated to promote sufficient time for all workers to think, to savor, to reflect, to pursue wholesome pastimes—not simply a lucky and special few. The philosopher Simone Weil, reflecting on a failed attempt to educate workers, wrote: Is this a reason to condemn all work of this kind? On the contrary, the important thing is to distinguish, among the attempts at working-class culture, those that are conducted in such a way as to strengthen the ascendancy of the intellectuals over the workers, and those conducted in such a way as to free the workers from this domination.

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Zena Hitz - Lost in Thought