David Symington speech to the parents club -- The Studio Story (8)

True education is impossible precisely to define, it is something that can only be hinted at, described indirectly. Nevertheless, this ideal of ‘true education’ is something that all of the traditional educational institutions in the world strive for, and, I would venture, is something that has been instinctively grasped in all traditional societies, but at times gets lost in the modern age. However, to understand what the best western educational institutions can offer a child and what they expect of a child, it is vital to get some grasp of what true education is and how the best schools and universities try to cultivate and nurture the minds under their care.

Now, this may all seem to be rather abstract, but grasping what true education is about is vital especially for those from one culture trying to come to terms with the education of another. This was highlighted to me by the October 3rd edition of the Economist newspaper which had a special section devoted to what it described as the “bamboo ceiling” – the trouble that even the most talented and brightest Asian American students have in getting accepted by the Ivy League universities. Let me quote directly from the Economist: “Michael Wang, a young Californian, came second in his class of 1,002 students; his ACT score was 36, the maximum possible, he sang at Barack Obama’s inauguration; he got third place in a national piano contest; he was in the top 150 of a national maths competition; he was in several national debating-competition finals. But when it came to university application he faced a serious disappointment for the first time in his glittering career. He was rejected by six of the seven Ivy League colleges to which he applied.” The carefully researched article then goes on to provide detailed statistics showing that Asian Americans simply don’t get the number of places in top US universities that their performance in secondary school tests, such as the SAT, would predict them to achieve. The Economist cites a study done carried out by two Princeton professors which indicated that an Asian-American needed to achieve 160 more points in their SAT than a white American to achieve a place at university. The reasons for this unfairness and disparity are complicated. No doubt prejudice, pure and simple, on the part of University admissions staff plays a part. However, I would suggest that one more awkward factor that should be considered is the possibility that professors in the Ivy Leagues are looking for something beyond test scores, beyond pure “academic attainment” in selecting students for courses. They are looking for something not quite tangible, something that cannot appear on a curriculum vitae, but something that may be glimpsed during a face-to-face interview, or inferred from an application essay. That intangible quality is, I would suggest, something that can only be described as an “educated outlook”. It is for that reason that I think it is so pressing to try, hard though it is, to describe this ineffable quality.

Perhaps the first thing to grasp is that education is not a question of acquiring facts and nuggets of “knowledge”. This first point is perhaps fairly obvious and has become a commonplace in people’s understanding of what education is about. But, and here perhaps I differ a little from the received wisdom, education is also not simply a matter of developing and training certain processes and habits of mind. So I want to make clear what I am about to describe is not the cliché that education needs to move beyond memorizing facts and rote learning and should focus on such buzzwords as “critical thinking”, “creativity” and “logical thinking.” AI technology has produced robots and drones with fantastic ability to do ‘critical thinking’, and a microchip can store the content of all the world’s libraries, but I have yet to meet an educated computer.

The first thing about true education is that it gives the student true “ownership” of cultural tradition in all its intellectual, aesthetic and moral aspects. Part of this means internalising the great works of philosophy, literature and art of a culture. Internalising means not just seeing them as objects of curiosity, but allowing them to live and breathe within you. Part of this is the quality of developing judgment and the ability to allow art, music, literature and great thinkers to engage with you. You have to learn to debate with Aristotle, test Plato’s arguments, see the great cultural monument’s flaws and all.

 

It is that ability to judge, rather than simply to gather “facts” like a collector of curios that really marks out the educated mind. A friend of mine, a Dutchman called Jesse who is an expert on the history of western art (and who I hope to entice to teach at “Studio” one day) once remarked to me that great though Michelangelo was, there is something he has always found “cold” about his paintings. They are incredibly powerful, masterful in their grasp of anatomy, give you a sense of the transcendent, of eternity and, yet, they completely lack human warmth. He contrasted that with Michelangelo’s great contemporary Raphael who was able to look deep into the human soul. “Michelangelo never painted portraits of real people, he simply couldn’t. Adam, yes, God, yes, the damned going to hell, yes, the archangel Gabriel, yes. But a real person sitting in front of him, not on his life.” Raphael, on the other hand, was a master of the portrait. Just look at his famous painting of Julius II in the National Gallery. It’s as if Raphael bore straight into the soul of this passionate yet corrupt, aesthetic yet ruthless prince of the church. It was his capacity to love and yet judge the great masterworks of the renaissance that immediately touched me and made me feel here was an educated mind. He “owned” Michelangelo; he “owned” Raphael. These two great artists coursed through his veins and he was able to talk about them from “the heart”.

In my own field of philosophy the difference between students who “understand” the philosophers with their own intellect and those who simply collect the “opinions” of the great thinkers is also what marks out the truly educated from the superficial mind. When I was at Oxford, I was taught what it means to be truly educated in philosophy by my own tutor, the late John Foster. At Oxford, every week as a philosophy student you have to write a long and detailed essay on a particular problem of philosophy or a particular philosopher’s point of view. The previous week the tutor has given you a long reading list and you spend the next seven days reading and trying to gather your thoughts together. When you have your next tutorial you have to read your essay out aloud to your tutor – an excruciating experience. Mr Foster always listened very attentively and was acutely sensitive to whenever I had written something which he felt I hadn’t understood. He would stop me with a, “you say Kant solved David Hume’s problem of causation?”

“Er… yes,” I would stammer.

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, Kant thought he’d solved it.”

“I know, but do you think he had?”

Or he would ask, “Do you think Locke’s argument here is valid?”

“Er… well, I suppose so, he was a great philosopher.”

“Maybe, but great philosophers all make idiotic mistakes, do you think Locke was right here?”

Looking back on it, I realise that what John Foster sought from his students was complete honesty, any hint of being glib, fudging it, pretending to know when you don’t, was, for him, anathema. He used to say, “To be a good philosopher you have to have the courage not to understand. When you don’t understand something, don’t pretend you do, acknowledge you don’t.” It is the philosophers who couldn’t ‘understand’ their ‘great’ forebears who were able to advance.”

What I now also realise is that what I was getting from Mr Foster’s tutorials was also something quintessential to the institution of Oxford. Oxford equips its philosophy graduates not only to “know” but to debate with and fight with all the great philosophers from the past. We learn to “recognise” them, learn their prejudices, foibles, mistakes; admire them but engage with them. More important than that, we were taught how to ponder and think. We learned the limits of knowledge, learned to analyse our underlying presuppositions, learned to be aware of ourselves as thinkers.

It was only after emerging from the sheltered cloisters of Oxford that I realised that the way many philosophy students outside the best universities had been taught was quite different. They might know the history of philosophy well, they might know the views and opinions of a hundred different thinkers throughout history, but they don’t know why they thought the way they did. For them, they are just a series of curiosities. It is rather like the difference between a butterfly spotter who recognises a Monarch Butterfly as compared to an entomologist who understands how the colouring pattern formed while it was in the chrysalis and how it evolved to be so patterned. More importantly so many philosophy students are not taught to question, but to worship the great thinkers. In that way, culture and learning become a burden and a toil.

True education should also be completely and utterly fascinating. It should elevate the student’s taste so for the rest of their life they can distinguish between what is valuable and what is not – not because they have learned what “real” culture is and what it is not, but because they have genuine taste. They can see and feel what is great art, great music, what is genuinely innovative thinking as opposed to sophistry.

Education taught by the very best institutions also goes hand in hand with a type of “virtue” – not exactly moral virtue, but the virtue of pursuing truth and discerning real beauty.

Finally true education is involved in “ends” and not “means”. The great Oxford professor C.S. Lewis (and author of the Narnia series) distinguished between things that have “meaning for life” and things which “give life meaning”. Education, in the truest sense is the latter. This flies in direct contrast with so much of what we hear about education. People talk about how we can make education “relevant” to students’ lives. How education can be improved so that students can be better “equipped” for the job market. That is an abuse of the word education. When people talk like that, they are referring to “training” and not true education. True education shows us what everything else we do in life is ultimately for. The ancient Roman poet Horace distinguished “otium” (leisure) from negotium (business). He pitied those who confused the one for the other. The purpose of business is to leave us time for leisure, but leisure is only meaningful if we have been shown how to use it.

So true education is emphatically not “utilitarian”, it is not “useful”, it is that for which everything else that is “useful” is targeted at. Here, most advocates of “true education” would stop. But I would like to add something, perhaps slightly paradoxical. Although true education is essentially non-utilitarian it is, in fact, also hugely “useful”. The truly educated are really those who inherit the world. The great statesmen, entrepreneurs, men of action are very often very educated in the true sense. Because it endows the mind with ownership of a culture, because it gives the mind a sense of judgment and proportion and a sense of true understanding, truly educated people are among the few people who can really contribute to the world and to society. The paradox is, that although education, without doubt, has those huge benefits, it nevertheless remains true that as soon as a student, teacher, school or university approaches education in a functional way, they attack and degrade this very value.

Returning then, to the purpose of this talk, what are the best educational institutions in the UK (or US or, indeed, anywhere else) looking for in prospective candidates? What will my child get from going to such an institution? Both come back to true education. These institutions want students in whom they can discern a mind that will benefit from and flourish with true education. A mind that is not stuffed and regurgitating undigested facts, but one which ponders, considers, wonders and has incorporated learning and experience. What will these best institutions do for your child? They will nurture, develop and educate their mind. Yes, they will equip them well for the ever-changing workforce of the 21st century, but they will do far more than that. They will open up a vista of learning, give them a taste of the ‘pleasures of the mind’ and give them the compass to explore the forest of human culture in their own way. They will equip them for the best possible life that can be lived by a person.

From its first inception, Studio was designed to provide, right here in Shanghai the kind of education that I refer to above. Through courses like Drama, BELLA, Classical Studies and Great Books, students will get the kind of exposure to a way of thinking, an engagement with “the best that has been thought and written” and to bring them into an intimate appreciation of western culture. For those students who take to the style of learning here, they will have no better grounding and preparation for the best British schools and universities.

From everything that has been said here, it should be very obvious that education is not a ‘one-size fits all’ process. Each and every child must tread their own path to finding their way into a life of culture. Each child must find their own way toward developing a passion for learning. That is why it is so hard to generalize about the traditional schools, universities and colleges of the UK and the US. Each has its own particular atmosphere and culture. More important than anything else is finding a school that is well suited to your particular child’s needs.

It is with that end in mind that we established Studio Private Client Services. A service designed to provide tailor-made counseling and advice to help your child find the ideal school for them and enrol successfully. Here we take each student through an extensive and personal assessment process. We will not only test different aptitudes, but talk extensively with the child and with the parent. There is no decision more important that what school to send your child too. Helping to make that decision and then implementing it is what Studio Private Client Services will be all about. 

—— To be continued ——

These stories are told from Studio perspective. Every family has its own story with Studio. We’d like to hear and publish yours too. Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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