Kevin Gary

This chapter is concerned with the moral significance of boredom. Boredom is a problematic mood state that is causally correlated with several troublesome behaviors. While omnipresent in schools, boredom is seldom addressed explicitly. Schools do, however, offer a latent curriculum vis-à-vis boredom. Confronted with boredom, students are conditioned to do one of two things: first, escape boring circumstances, as much as possible, or second, resign themselves to boredom as an inevitable part of life. Both responses are problematic and avoid meaningful reflection on and engagement with this troubling mood state. In the chapter, I explore the nature of boredom (both situational and existential). I then turn to Albert Borgmann’s notion of a focal practice as a promising antidote to boredom. In Borgmann’s phenomenology of focal practices, I find resources for a pedagogy that begins to constructively address the perilous mood state of boredom.

Though sensitivity to pedagogy infuses all of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, Kierkegaard’s voice in education, and moral education specifically, is scant. This is striking considering the range and depth of his influence in philosophy and theology. Given the ethico-religious telos that animates Kierkegaard’s project, and the amazing variety of texts that illuminate and enact the existential journey into lived virtue, Kierkegaard offers a wealth of resources for pedagogies that aspire to cultivate virtue. Yet Kierkegaard does, as his pseudonym Johannas Climacus intends, create difficulties. Specifically, he exposes how difficult it is to become and remain virtuous. Moreover, he reveals how difficult it is to teach others how to become virtuous, all the while enacting a pedagogy that intends to do just that. In this essay I make a case for Kierkegaard’s indispensable contribution to a pedagogy that aims to impart virtue. Specifically, I examine the challenge the aesthetic sphere poses for virtue ethics, noting the interior moves that precede, undergird, and sustain the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere. I then explore Kierkegaard’s pedagogical approach that aims to reach the aesthete.