Learning is Amazing. If you haven’t heard that said before then you’ve not been paying close enough attention – it didn’t gain the same national press as when we said we wouldn’t use “sir” or “miss” to refer to staff but it’s something I say often, it’s an ethos that lies at the heart of Harris Westminster and on which our school is built. On that side point, please don’t call me, or any of the other staff sir (or miss) – use our names, Mr Handscombe, Ms Curtis and so on, or, if you forget, then you call us all “teacher”. Back to the main thread and it’s likely “learning is amazing” is something that’s been repeated often enough to become a bit of a joke – did you chuckle to yourself when I started my assembly with it? Think “There he goes, doing a Handscombe thing – if we wait a couple of minutes he’ll quote Taylor Swift or Tolkien”? If so, it’s a fair cop – I do use the phrase, and the works of those poets, but whilst you may or may not enjoy the same writers as I do, I hope we are agreed on the same thesis, that we come together in the same ethos.
It’s an interesting distinction that lies at the heart of our community at Harris Westminster. The spirit of our discussions is not universal agreement – we have our own preferences when it comes to art, literature, sport, politics, culture, even areas of scholarship and we come together to argue in favour of our own points of view and to listen to others, to be enriched by different perspectives and to have our positions tested. The literary references I use are not intended to be a dictat, that tells you what you should or should not enjoy but a recommendation, a suggestion that if I liked something then maybe you would too. This even applies to film, where I am on record as having said that The Princess Bride is canonically the best of all time. I hope that this decree has been taken in the sense that it was made – as a hubristic claim to authority that I could never hold, as a position to be disputed, and as a firmly held, but clearly subjective belief. You might prefer Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (which, by the way, I thought was basically fine) and we can go on much as we have before.
Learning is amazing is a statement of a rather different nature – it’s something that I believe to be true a lot of the time, that I want to be true all of the time, a philosophy that we can all embrace. If you’re not sure then I hope my words can persuade you to give it a chance, to commit to the bit, to throw yourself into the learning game and expect to come out smiling.
This shared belief is at the heart of Harris Westminster, it’s why we describe ourselves as a community of scholars, and it drives the way we behave – in nearly every situation you can ask yourself “how would I behave here if I believed with my whole heart that learning was amazing” and find that the answer will point you in the right direction. There are a couple of caveats here and the first is the problem of words. I say that Learning is Amazing is an ethos, not a slogan or a motto and the reason is that it is not so much the words that are important as the meaning that they carry. “Words are not to be used without meaning,” according to George Berkeley in his 1713 treatise “Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous”. George Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who disputed with Newton and Locke and was influential on Kant and Hume (which will be valuable information to some of you in placing him in the landscape of human thought and simply a list of names to others). He is buried in Christchurch Oxford and gives his name to the city and university of Berkeley in Northern California. “Words are not to be used without meaning,” he says – and I propose to take this seriously, to explore the meaning of my own words (with new words, of course, I’m worried that philosophy is an endless quest). Before I do, however, I need to point out that I’m playing a bit of a trick here – the three dialogues are a conversation between two characters, Hylas and Philonous, and, whilst the latter represents Berkeley’s point of view, the former is a straw man, created by Berkeley to put forward opinions that he can argue against. The problem for me is that it is Hylas that says “Words are not to be used without meaning” – the problem for you is that you’ve not read the three dialogues and would have been ready to accept Berkeley’s claim on my say so. In our community of scholarship both of us have a responsibility here – when I’m sharing my ideas with you, I have to be scrupulous, to be careful not to mislead you, to do my best to point out the limitations of what I know (and to that end, I should say that I’m not a Berkeleian scholar – I’ve simply enjoyed what he has to say about words). Meanwhile, your role here (and it’s reversed, of course, when you share your learning with me) is to think critically, to think hard, and to check my sources if you think I’m pulling a fast one.
In this case, we must check what Philonous has to say about words: he accuses Hylas of being careless “you employ words to no manner of purpose, without any design or signification whatsoever. And I leave it to you to consider how mere jargon should be treated.” Later he says “be not deceived by words; but sound your own thoughts.” It seems that both philosophers believe that words should have meaning, that jargon and slogans are to be mistrusted. So let’s interrogate ours.
Learning is amazing – but what is learning and what does it mean to be amazing. Learning includes your subjects and within those the specifications for your exams, but it’s much more than this – your twenty two months here are the time to be ready to face the adult world and qualifications are only part of what you need for that. Learning about yourself, what you find easy (that maybe others don’t) and what you have to really put effort into, learning about others, how to lead, persuade, get on, make friends, learning about the wider world, the opportunities that it offers, the city you live in, the competing desires and needs of people whose decisions affect those around them – these are all amazing too and I hope you find your time here is filled with all these kinds of learning.
Learning is amazing, but it’s not easy. The skills and knowledge you acquire here will get you ready to face a whole range of challenges but you won’t pick them up for free – there’s no royal road to scholarship (that’s Euclid) and you can’t get there dancing through life (that’s from Wicked). Learning is hard work but it’s worth it, not just for the future but for the immediate joy of understanding, of things making sense, of finding that you have more questions than you started with, that curiosity means that learning goes on forever (it’s even worse than philosophy for that). And learning being amazing means that it’s amazing for everyone – we’re not selfish learners at Harris Westminster, we want everyone to share, and we’re not jerks, letting what we want trample on the needs of others, we look around, recognise the impact that we’re making (this is part of learning to be an adult) and modify it so that everyone benefits. All of the kinds of learning are amazing in a whole range of ways for all of the people. That’s what our ethos means.
I said there were a couple of caveats to the idea that if you always make the most learning-is-amazing-ish decision then you’ll be doing the right thing – and the second one is that there are a small number of community rules that I don’t think you can derive from first principles, that I just have to tell you and then you have to do them. Rule 1 – the basement is out of bounds to anyone who does not wish to die a very painful death. This is not because of a three headed dog called Fluffy but rather because it’s a maze of storage for premises equipment. You can park your bikes down there but do that and leave, don’t go exploring. Similarly, don’t hang around in the alleyway down the back of school – it’s not safe. Rule 2 is about smoking and drinking, basically they are absolutely not allowed on premises, cigarettes, vapes and alcohol are all right out, but more than that, we ask that you keep them well away from school: no smoking on Tothill St or the triangle between Tothill and Victoria and please don’t use any of the pubs within 400m of school so if I decide to pop into one for a small glass of lemonade on an evening I don’t come across you to both of our discomfort. Rule 3 you could work out from the idea of being aware of your impact on others but I don’t want to wait for you to do that – the pavements outside school are quite small and there are little old ladies that want to use them – if 600 of you stand there waiting for each other you block the pavement and the little old ladies have to walk in the road and get crushed by buses. Be aware of your surroundings, move away when we ask you, but actually don’t wait to be asked – wait for your friends inside or across the road, get your group out of the way when people are coming, be considerate.
We are a community of scholars where learning can be amazing for each one of us if we support each other and we are a school where a lot happens in a day – it has to, there’s a lot of learning to pack in and not as many days as we’d like. If you find that prospect daunting then let me finish today’s assembly by pointing out one more implication of our ethos: it means that you don’t need to know it all already, you don’t need to get it right first time – in fact the expectation is that you don’t know, that you need to ask for advice and help, you need to spend time to think about things, that you’ll make some mistakes. I was listening to some Olivia Dean whilst I was writing this, as a recommendation from one of your generation who thought I might enjoy her music and whilst most of her lyrics are fairly standard heteronormative romantic nonsense I was struck by the notion of Baby Steps, and the line “I won’t fall back if I fall forward.” If you find the challenge of Harris Westminster daunting then don’t worry about getting to the end in a single stride (it’s not possible anyway), don’t worry about falling down (fall forwards and then get up and do it again), definitely don’t let it freeze you in one place, take some ba ba ba baby steps. Baby step 1: get into school early and do 20 minutes of study in the library before lessons start; baby step 2: carry a book in your bag and read it on your commute – ask the librarian for suggestions if you’re not sure what to read; baby step 3: follow up on the recommendations of others and share your own enthusiasms (I for one am always interested in interesting lyricists); baby step 4: pause for a moment now, think about your resolutions, your ambitions and remember them. Make a memory of this place, this time, where you are sitting in the Abbey, who you are sitting with, so when times get hard you can remind yourself of your commitment.
Ba ba ba baby steps – because if anyone lives in a world of learning it’s babies.
Footnotes
1. The idea of addressing staff by their names was radically introduced in No More Sir, No More Miss
2. Swift and Tolkien are not quoted here but are fairly ubiquitous, examples include Big City Ambition, and Sam, Frodo and Tagore
3. Wicked was used as a vehicle to introduce the year in Changed for Good but this is Euclid's first appearance (a strange omission that it's good to rectify)
4. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous can be found on Project Gutenberg so you can check my scholarship and read Berkeley's challenge to sceptics and atheists.
5. Olivia Dean, meanwhile, can be found on YouTube (and elsewhere) singing Baby Steps