Amongst the writers on schools as learning communities, few address the puzzle of how healthy solitude can be supported within a communal, relational, form of schooling.  In a study of learning communities, children were asked ‘when do you feel most included in school?’, and two  children (aged 7 or 8) responded by saying, in one way or another, ‘when I’m left alone, to work on my own’ (Stern 2009, p 49).  Being ‘left alone’ is, in that case, not an alternative to communal schooling, but a fulfilment of communal schooling.  Uses of solitude (or oral/aural solitude – i.e. silence – Hägg and Kristiansen 2012) to disengage from the immediate present are important.  But most such forms of disengagement are intended, nevertheless, to achieve dialogue.  In schools, such healthy solitude can be achieved through reading, for example: a practice that is both solitudinous and dialogic, disengaged from immediate surroundings and engaged with ‘distant’ fictional or real characters and places in the book. 

Dialogic uses of solitude can be focused on the past, the present, and/or the future, and can be focused inwards (dialogue with the self) or outwards.  Where the past is seen as having primacy and is seen as ‘canonic’ and the source of greatest authority, this is a more conservative use of dialogue (Oakeshott 1991, Leavis 1948 a, b).  Where the conversation is more developmental or future-oriented, voicing the young and the less-powerful and building for the future, there is a more radical use of dialogue Macmurray (1946 a, b), Buber (1958, 2002), and Noddings (1994, 2012).  A third dimension of dialogue has emerged in recent years alongside the development of communications technologies.  Dialogue can be intensely oriented to the present.  Immediate, short-term, reaction to events, through social media, can seem to flood out established voices from the past, or considered and thoughtful hopes or plans for the future.  All these forms of dialogue, though, are enhanced by forms of solitude.

Apparently non-dialogic solitude, involving disengagement to the point at which even dialogue with oneself seems absent, is described as ‘enstasy’ in translations of the ancient Hindu text the Bhagavad-Gītā (Zaehner 1969).  This term contrasts with ‘ecstasy’, that is, ‘going out of oneself’.  To be enstatic is to be ‘contented in the self alone’ (Zaehner 1969, p 52).  Children and young people may be enabled by their schools to experience, to some extent, being contented in the self, through solitude. 

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