Leisure, Policy and Education. Insights and challenges twenty five centuries after Aristotle

This paper aims to rehabilitate leisure as one of the fundamental components of educational policy planning. Drawing on an epistemological and longitudinal analysis on leisure, we show how criteria and actions may be used to face educational challenges. This is precisely a very relevant topic nowadays, as democratic societies need, perhaps more than ever, to educate their members are free citizens, able to participate in the decision planning and taking processes. Our main argument is embedded in the first great synthesis of policy, education and classic philosophy, mainly in Aristotle's works, various epistemological and semantic factors and the recent approaches of Russell and Nussbaum who understand leisure as the guarantee of practical rationality of educational policy. Our results emphasize leisure as skhole and show its potential innovative value for humankind in a creative educational policy design.