Comparative Societies and Cultures was a course born from the heart of Studio Education. So many of our founding partners and early families were involved that it is really now quite difficult to say exactly who came up with the idea. As I remember it, the evolution was something like this:

Sylvia Yu, the mother of one of the very first students at Studio, spoke with our founder James Jobbins about how much she felt Studio had to offer parents in Shanghai who wanted their children to gain a genuine and deep appreciation of English literature. One of the driving forces for founding Studio itself was the realisation that many students in Shanghai were now yearning for instruction that took them beyond seeing English through the prism of EFL/EAL instruction and helped them to begin to see language as a gateway to understanding English history, heritage and culture. Thus Studio’s first course, BELLA (Beyond English Language and Literary Arts), was born. The course was so successful in bringing students in touch with the treasures of English literature, from Beowulf and Marlowe to John Le Carre, that Sylvia proposed to James that a similarly-engaged teaching of China’s literary heritage and traditions would also be appreciated by many students and their families. This idea resonated with James’ concept of Studio as not merely a language school, but an institution for enriching students’ intellectual lives – in any language of instruction. The notion that many students in the Chinese school system were failing to engage with China’s heritage and were being put off by poor teaching also struck a chord with James. He had witnessed such trends when teaching in secondary schools in the UK – students were often victims of ideologically driven curricula that underestimated their abilities and willingness to meet academic challenges. Teachers, whether in China or the UK, had forgotten that students taught in a genuinely inspiring way truly want to have their horizons broadened through a knowledge-based, rigorous and engaging literary education. 

Analysis and diagram extracted from an online entry written for Studio students

Thus the idea of devising a course on Chinese literary heritage was born. That original idea has now become Studio’s “Splendours of Chinese Literature” course, which is going to be offered later in 2018 -- but that’s for another post. To return to our story, after I arrived at Studio, Sylvia and James approached me with the idea and I said that maybe we could consider devising a programme that would not be confined simply to literature but would take students on a journey of comparison through Chinese and Western civilizations across many disciplines: science, philosophy, religion, politics, law, art, music. The idea would be to help students who are living at the crossroads of Chinese and Western cultures to deepen their understanding of how differences in cultural attitudes, values, aesthetic senses and modes of discourse have evolved over the last two to three millennia. 

This is how CsC (Comparative Societies and Cultures) was born. The journey since, for all those involved, has truly been an intellectual adventure, frustrating at times (as you would expect when trying to devise a cutting-edge course for school-aged children for which there are no existing models to draw on), but always deeply fascinating. 

The Comparative Societies and Cultures tour runs from 23rd July, 2018 to 5th August, 2018. To learn more about the tour, enrolment, and all Global Learning programmes, please visit us at studio.education/globallearning

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