The online learning will see students reading articles about different topics, the titles of some of which are listed below, participating in live webinars with their teachers and fellow students, and submitting essays. Two essays per month will be returned to students with detailed written feedback: 14 essays over a seven-month period.

After having completed their online study, students will be ready to fully benefit from on-site learning opportunities, including debate, oral presentations, essay and creative writing, and dramatic and other collaborative artistic performances. They will be accompanied and mentored by specialist teachers and experts in their fields of study. 

By the close of the residential, students will have begun the processes of synthesising their accumulated knowledge, discussing and processing their thoughts, towards the cultivation of an integrated intellectual personality, capable of expressing well-informed, constructive and purposeful insights on international questions of culture and societal significance.

Here is an extract from an article on modernist poetry, which students encounter towards the end of the Unit on Art and Aesthetics: 

Modernist Poetry in China and the West

A quick re-cap:
We have talked about how poetry is the oldest literary form – in the case of the Greeks, it wasn’t just the only way of expressing any form of fictional narrative, but was also the only form of expressing anything in writing. Solon, when expressing his political ideas, Parmenides when expressing his metaphysical theories, expressed themselves in hexameter verse – because, for them, that was the only way of expressing yourself in writing. Meter simply was what writing entailed, just as commas, full-stops and paragraphs are part and parcel of writing for us today. China’s oldest literature is also poetry. The forms to which Chinese poetry must conform are, of course, different from Greek, but the principle is strikingly similar – words must conform to sound patterns. It is counter-intuitive that prose comes after poetry – we presume people always spoke in prose. So prose really can’t be seen as an “invention”, but as a “discovery” – a flash of realisation that we can write just as we speak. The fact that that seems so trivial a discovery to us today, only proves that we need to ponder and think about why for humanity this was, in fact, such a major breakthrough. What does it tell us about ourselves that Western and Chinese civilisations both instinctively felt that writing had to be graced with meter and rhythm?

David Symington is our Director of Liberal Arts and course leader for Classical Studies, Great Books, World History and History of Thought. He is a broadcast journalist, newsreader, Masters graduate and PhD candidate in Chinese Philosophy at Fudan University. He read Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford. 

Professor Henan Cheng is Professor at Columbia University and Project Research for The Yale-China Association. Professor Cheng is a leading academic in the International and Transcultural Studies program at Columbia University. She serves as a research fellow and associate director at the Center for Chinese Education in New York City. She attended Peking University and is an expert in education in ethnic populations.