And Rugby in the Sunshine

The first team

Just two and a half weeks after the opening of the school, the boys played their first rugby match today against Caterham School. Though they didn’t win, they competed with great spirit and can be proud of what they achieved against a school with a strong rugby tradition.

Ready for a scrum

Into action

Keep an eye on the ball

Showing determination

Unfortunately our photographer was at the other end of the field when this happened: the first ever try scored by a Cedars boy. And what a try it was too!

The first try

Rugby in the Rain

The fine summer weather may be suddenly over, but that wasn’t going to prevent us from having a great rugby training session. The Year 7s were out in the rain today, honing their skills.

In fact they positively enjoyed themselves.

And the more they practised (under the expert supervision of our rugby coach) the better (and quicker) they got.

And the kicking’s not too bad either.

Food for thought

Some more pictures from our first week…the theme today is food.

Good things come to those who wait

Good food and good company

Everyone has been talking about Mrs Rodriguez’s shepherd’s pie!

Five star dining, Cedars style

 

Keeping up the Tradition

Although The Cedars School is no more than a few days old, the building itself has quite a history, which I will explore in more detail in later blog posts. Dating from the late 18th Century, it used to be called Coombe House. By 1937 the house had become a convalescent home for army officers, before being converted into a school in 1945.

St Margaret’s was a specialist residential school for physically disabled children and was clearly a trailblazer in all sorts of ways. So we were delighted when the former headmaster, some teachers and a former student visited us last week.

It was particularly inspiring to hear about their care for individuals, their strong links with the children’s parents, and their determination to help their pupils flourish. The example of service they helped to establish is a tradition we are determined to maintain.

 

Our distinguished visitors

The School Opens!

If you have been wondering why the blog has gone quiet in recent weeks, it is because we have been very busy preparing for this great week. Teachers have been appointed, classrooms have been equipped, buildings have been refurbished. A huge amount of work has been done by a huge number of people and now the adventure begins in earnest.

We are delighted to welcome two classes of Year 7 boys into the school and are really looking forward to working with them and their families over the next seven years. We will keep you updated as we journey through our first historic year but if you would like to see for yourself, please do join us for our Open Day on Saturday 28^th September between 10am and 1pm.

Hard at work on the first day

And a great game of football too

 

How to win at Scrabble: an apologia for Latin

Roy Peachey’s reflections on the recent Classics Conference at the British Museum…

I have just got back from a conference of Latin teachers at The British Museum where I learned about different ways of bringing the Classical world to life in the classroom. I also cast my eye over the bookstall and noticed a paperback by Peter Jones explaining How the Ancient Greeks and Romans Solved the Problems of Today; selections from Cicero explaining How to Run a Country; another book by Cicero explaining How to Win an Election; Scrabble in Latin; films in Latin; tea towels and sticker books in Latin;Harry Potter (in Latin and Greek); The Hobbit, Paddington, and The Gruffalo in Latin.

All of which got me thinking about why we have Latin on the curriculum at The Cedars. Is it preparation for holidays in Italy? Is it to help us win elections and run the country? Or is it so that we can really impress our friends when we play Scrabble?

Cicero in full flow

The phenomenal success of the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition at The British Museum gives us one answer. People are still fascinated by the Romans, their stories, their lives and, in some cases, their deaths, so one reason for studying Latin is that it gives us access to a world which many people find hugely interesting in its own right.

A second, and related, reason is that Latin is worth studying for its own sake. It is a beautiful and beautifully precise language. You might need to take my word for that if you’re just starting your studies but it’s true.

It could also be argued that studying Latin brings other benefits. It helps us be logical, analytical, and precise and so is a great subject for mathematicians and scientists as well as for linguists.

But I don’t think these additional benefits provide the main reason why schools like ours have Latin on the curriculum. More significant is the fact that Latin is foundational; it is the root from which all sorts of academic plants have grown.

Some languages are directly descended from Latin – Spanish, French, and Italian to name just a few – which means that knowing Latin will also help you learn them. But Latin can help us with more than just these modern languages. English, for example, is essentially a Germanic language but one which has been shaped by Latin influences. It is clear that a knowledge of Latin vocabulary and Latin grammar is a great help to anyone who wants to improve his English skills.

Much the same is true of literature. Books don’t come out of nowhere. They develop as part of a tradition, and right at the heart of that tradition is Latin (and Greek) literature. In fact, while we’re on the topic, we need to mention history. If we want to understand history – if we are to understand the world in which we now live – we have to gain a knowledge of the Roman world.

Latin has been preserved not just in languages, literature and history but in the Church as well. Indeed, Latin is still the language of the Catholic Church, which is one reason why Pope Benedict, in one of his last acts as pope, set up a Pontifical Academy for Latin to encourage the teaching of the language.

Latin is also important for us as a school because it has always been at the heart of a liberal education. The Liberal Arts tradition has changed over the years but the place of Latin within the curriculum has been accepted by virtually everyone who holds this tradition dear. Given the history of education, you could say that the absence of Latin from many schools is the real surprise.

It’s also important to point out that just because our students will be studying Latin it doesn’t mean that they will be ignoring the modern world. They will not be studying Latin to the exclusion of other subjects like Science or Design and Technology, nor will they be ignoring the great powers of the 21st Century. Our pupils can learn both Latin and Chinese (which is on offer as an after-school club).

In other words, we haven’t included Latin in the curriculum for nostalgic reasons or because we’ve worked our way through the Harry Potter books in English and fancy a new challenge. We believe that studying Latin brings clear benefits as well as being a good thing in its own right.

And yes, it might also help us win elections, run the country, prepare for holidays to Italy and, most importantly of all, impress our friends when we play Scrabble.

Induction Day

This gallery contains 23 photos.

On Saturday 8th June, we were pleased to welcome some of our first pupils to an induction day.  The weather was superb as we traveled down to the Surrey Outdoor Education Centre at High Ashurst in two minibuses.  After a morning of working with ropes we had a BBQ lunch – courtesy of Dr Virgili […]

The importance of history

Roy Peachey, Director of Learning, comments on the proposed new National Curriculum for History, without being drawn into any controversy of course…

There are few school subjects as controversial as History, as the discussion around Michael Gove’s proposed changes to the National Curriculum has again reminded us. In this post I don’t want to get too drawn into current wrangles but intend instead to step back, to gain some historical distance, in order to see how we might find a way forward.

One of the complaints levelled against the teaching of History in schools in recent years has been its over-reliance on certain eras (notably the Twentieth Century) and certain topics (especially Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia). There is now general agreement that we need something more, that schoolchildren need to study the broad sweep of history, that “a knowledge of Britain’s past, and our place in the world, helps us understand the challenges of our own time” as the draft Purpose of Study for the new National Curriculum for History puts it.

An over reliance on 20th Century history?

However, there is much less agreement about what this should mean in practice.

A historian who can help us here is Christopher Dawson, an Englishman who was a professor at Harvard University. Convinced that “one of the chief defects of modern education has been its failure to find an adequate method for the study of our own civilization”, Christopher Dawson wrote a series of fascinating books, including The Crisis of Western Education.

In it he argued that “the study of Christian culture … offers a new approach to the three great problems that confront Western education at our present time: first, how to maintain the tradition of liberal education against the growing pressure of scientific specialization and utilitarian vocationalism; secondly, how to retain the unity of Western culture against the dissolvent forces of nationalism and racialism; and thirdly, how to preserve the tradition of Christian culture in the age of secularism.”

This focus on Christian culture may require some explanation. Dawson believed that “single-minded study of the classics and classical world”, as Glenn W. Olson put it in a recent article in Logos, “had blinded people to the nature and significance of the Christian world that had grown up since antiquity. … Dawson thought it strange that sixteenth-century men should read so many pagan classics and, philosophy and theology aside, so little of the great Christian works that had subsequently appeared, especially works of the imagination like the Cid or Parzival that were built around the question of what it means to live the Christian life in the world.”

He believed, by contrast, that, whatever our own religious beliefs, we should be studying the growth and development of Christian culture (in its broadest sense) because it was Christianity which created and shaped the culture we still live in today.

Like C. S. Lewis among others, Dawson refused to accept the division of history into ancient, medieval and modern eras. The so-called Middle Ages were not an interlude between the glories of the ancient world and the glories of the (so-called) Renaissance. They were as worthy of study as any other. In fact, because this was the period that shaped the culture or civilization we have inherited, it was a time which should have received special attention.

It is certainly possible to argue that writing off this thousand years of history has been enormously damaging. Generations of schoolchildren have grown up assuming that there was little more to the period between 400 and 1500 than Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, and a few nasty diseases.

Neglected: the Middle Ages

Fortunately, other historians have taken up the argument where Dawson left off. Peter Brown, for instance, wrote in his classic book The World of Late Antiquity that: “we are increasingly aware of the astounding new beginnings associated with this period: we go to it to discover why Europe became Christian and why the Near East became Muslim; we have become extremely sensitive to the ‘contemporary’ quality of the new, abstract art of this age; the writings of men like Plotinus and Augustine surprise us, as we catch strains – as in some unaccustomed overture – of so much that a sensitive European has come to regard as most ‘modern’ and valuable in his own culture.”

St Augustine

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us able to agree with many, though not perhaps all, of Michael Gove’s ideas. We certainly agree that “a high-quality history education equips pupils to think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement” and we also share the aims of the draft National Curriculum, that all pupils should:

know and understand the story of these islands;
know and understand British history as a coherent, chronological narrative;
know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history;
gain and deploy a historically-grounded understanding of abstract terms;
understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses;
understand how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed;
gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

But, put like that, it sounds rather dry. We see History as a subject that can inspire. As our Year 7 pupils explore the history of Britain from Roman times until the Norman Conquest in the context of European and, to a certain extent, world affairs, they will be undertaking a great journey of discovery that will help shape them for the rest of their lives.

The distinguished historian Christian Meier recently claimed that “we are experiencing more history and more historical change than almost any generation before us, and yet we take virtually no interest in it.” We are going to buck that trend.

In gaudio serviamus!

Pablo Hinojo, assistant director of student residence, Netherhall House, believes The Cedars is already living up to its motto, three months before the doors open!

As the final academic term draws to a close, the first stage of works at the Cedars is also coming to an end. The school is taking shape and the final touches are now being added in preparation for September.

A group of university students living in Netherhall House (a student residence in North London) decided it would be a good idea to give a hand at the Cedars every fortnight. Since January many of us have put aside our personal weekend plans and battled the bitter cold of winter (and snow!) to make a contribution in the different manual tasks which needed to be done. We have been excited by the project and are happy to make a difference to the school.

Volunteers, including a future Cedars student!

A group of university students ready to sacrifice themselves to make a difference is itself rather impressive. What has struck me is that, by and large my colleagues who have rolled their sleeves up and contributed to the hard work at The Cedars have themselves studied in academic institutions sharing the same ethos and ideals to those of The Cedars.

That, I think, speaks volumes of the success of the model offered at The Cedars; combining academic excellence with the capacity to develop integrally as a person for the better good of society. Indeed, it has been encouraging to see how fondly university students remember their schools. They have therefore felt the eagerness to contribute by leaving their mark on the project and pass on what they learned while at their schools.

It seems The Cedars’ motto, in gaudio serviamus, has already proved to be fitting; even before the official opening of the school!

The Liberal Arts: A 21st Century Education

By Roy Peachey, Director of Learning

In 2010 a broadsheet journalist suggested that Liberal Arts degrees could be “the next big thing” in British universities and there are signs that he may have been right.

The Benedictus Trust, for example, is currently in the process of setting up a Catholic Liberal Arts college which will offer foundation and undergraduate degree courses. It’s not alone in this: several other well-known institutions are also moving into the field. The University of Exeter, for instance, is launching what it calls an “innovative, interdisciplinary and challenging” Liberal Arts degree for September 2013, as are King’s College, London, the University of Birmingham and University College, London (though UCL has now chosen to call its degree an Arts and Sciences BASc).

If some of the big players in British higher education are moving into what is a well-established field in the USA and elsewhere, the obvious question to ask is: what is the appeal?

Mark Roche, Professor of German Language and Literature and Concurrent Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has recently written a book (called Why Choose the Liberal Arts?) to answer that question. He develops three overlapping arguments for a liberal arts education: “first, its intrinsic value, or the distinction of learning for its own sake, the sheer joy associated with exploring the life of the mind and asking the great questions that give meaning to life; second, the cultivation of those intellectual virtues that are requisite for success beyond the academy, a liberal arts education as preparation for a career; and third, character formation and the development of a sense of vocation, the connection to a higher purpose or calling.” Put that way, we can see the great appeal the Liberal Arts have for us at The Cedars.

Far from being “the next big thing”, the liberal arts have, of course, been around for a very long time. As Nigel Tubbs, Professor of Philosophical and Educational Thought (and Programme Leader for Modern Liberal Arts) at the University of Winchester, points out to prospective students, it is single-subject degrees that are “the new kids on the block”. As he puts it with a certain rhetorical flourish, “We were here in 400BC.”

The liberal arts may have been around in 400BC but they aren’t stuck in the past. In fact they have never remained static. By late Antiquity they had been formalised as the Trivium (logic, grammar and rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) but the tradition was further developed by a 6th Century monk called Cassiodorus who, following many of St Augustine’s ideas, brought the liberal arts firmly into the world of Christian education.

As Professor Paul Freedman of Yale University puts it: “At his monastery of Vivarium in southern Italy, Cassiodorus developed a notion of the liberal arts as an aid to religious truth. The liberal arts is not his invention, but the notion of the liberal arts culminating in a program that has a purpose in which classical culture is fused with Christian culture is his doing.” Cassiodorus’s ideas were taken up across Europe and helped to create the pan-European (and, ultimately, international) system that survived into the 20th Century.

Since then there have been many changes, some of which have been necessary responses to the circumstances of the modern world (including, for example, the development of science and computing), and some of which have been less welcome responses to the spread of secularism. We need to be clear, therefore, about what we mean when we talk about a liberal arts approach to education. The key principles in our view are:

1. The interconnectedness of knowledge.

At The Cedars we draw out links between subjects so that our pupils do not compartmentalise what they learn.

2. Ideas develop within cultures and so both ideas and cultures need to be studied.

As Christopher Dawson has argued, there should be more to a Liberal Arts education than simply a Great Books programme (but maybe I’ll deal with that in another blog post). A key component of any Liberal Arts curriculum should be the study of the cultures in which those great books were written.

3. Respect for the past.

As one respected academic wrote recently: “we are experiencing more history and more historical change than almost any generation before us, and yet we take virtually no interest in it.” At The Cedars we impart a respect for learning, wherever and whenever it might come from.

4. Truth, Goodness and Beauty are at the heart of all we do.

5. Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric are still worth teaching.

We hear a great deal about problems in British education but, it seems to us, there are some tremendously liberating ideas out there too. Maybe, just maybe, a Liberal Arts education could be the “next big thing” not only in British universities but in its schools too.