Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life, by Kevin HoodGary, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 146 pp.

When children complain of boredom, it is tempting to pathologize their plight."Boring people are often bored," I have been known to say to my own children and sometimes want to say to those of others.While this may serve to relieve me of any duty to entertain -something I am not good at anyway -faulting individuals for their boredom might, in the end, miss something essential about the source and nature of this persistent and thorny problem.As we all know, boredom does not just annoy children, it burrows its wormy way into the daily lives of adults as well.And while boredom in the form of , accidia, or ennui has deep roots in our history, its seemingly ubiquitous presence in the current age of distraction calls out for special attention.Not surprisingly, many scholars have answered the call.There is now apparently a philosophy of boredom, 1 psychology of boredom, 2 history of boredom, 3 culture of boredom, 4 space of boredom, 5 and a science of boredom. 6In the field of education, one can also find several trade books on addressing classroom boredom. 7Kevin Gary's Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life is a refreshingly un-modern approach to this topic. 8 It has the advantage of offering something more than boredom-avoidance schemes or stoic resignation.At a manageable length of 138 pages, it presents the reader with a timely and provocative critique of contemporary culture.Gary begins by diagnosing the problem, which for him is the persistent, corrosive effect of the way we face boredom in contemporary society.He reminds the reader of a time when teachers were encouraged to address the needs of the whole child, to prepare them not only for the world of work but also for a flourishing life of good citizenship and worthy leisure, a life that acknowledges both the extrinsic and intrinsic goods of school subjects and activities.While readers might question the extent to which public education was ever really intended to achieve these lofty aims, Gary's indictment of today's schools is damning.He finds something terribly amiss in the Common Core standards that encourage students to "assess, critique, analyze, evaluate, interpret, integrate, demonstrate, [and] apply" while completely neglecting students' capacities to "appreciate, wonder, enjoy, contemplate, admire, [and] savor" (WBM, 15).Leisure, a moral concept in Gary's estimation, is relegated to the private sphere, the free time we have to waste on