Head's Blog | Araby | Embley School, a private school in Hampshire

Winnie the Pooh is a hundred. I wonder if your experience of him is as a wonder ancient and new. There is a timelessness to the stories and adventures that appeals to generation after generation of children. This got me thinking about stories and reading and a meeting with a sixth former which was billed as a library update; a project planning session but we got side tracked by the agenda.It has been a wonderful week of interaction with the Sixth Form for me; lunch with the student leadership touched on a bewildering array of themes. Yes, reading and literature came up, more to follow, but we also delved into the limits of reason; the capacities of Science to know and understand the world as well as the weirdness of subatomic physics and reader, before you leap in to protest the use of 'weirdness', I think weirdness is the correct word to use here. Take, for an example, the famous double slit experiment which sees light acting as both a wave and a particle. Hang on, isn’t it supposed to be one or the other? Yes, so conventional thinking would argue, but it doesn’t. (Is your head starting to hurt yet?) How comfortable are you with 'weird' at this point? The conversations just bubbled up. A visiting Head from another school noted that some folk talk to students about last night’s football or Traitors. Embley does things a tad differently.
 
I suppose I write about this to give you a flavour of what sort of conversations we have. There are more mundane interactions, but when we sit down to have lunch or to meet each other, the conversation is always challenging and engaging; the more so for being spontaneous and without plan. I suspect the very best conversations take this course. The early days of pedagogy had a similar style; the Socratic approach to discussion followed these lines. The outcome was not a defined landing point rather an exploration that extended thinking and challenged assumptions. I know I have tabled this before, but I delight in the disagreements. I hope this doesn’t read as being too perverse: "but they know not England who only England know”. The most fulfilling aspects of these encounters is not the cultivation of homogenous yes persons who accept unchallenged whatever is holding sway, but the real meeting of minds who look at ideas differently. I am sure reader that you will envy me my position, who would not? To be in the company of others prepared to share their perspective and to probe, question, tease out the differences in how we see the world. It is not at all about agreeing; nor is it a battle of egos where discussion is subverted under the concealing cover of conviviality. The humility with which positions are shared, others heard not just listened and responded, to is chastening.
 
The conversation with the sixth former ended with the discussion around quantum and Feynman, but had its origin in literature and what is worth reading. We talked about relevance and the manner in which we understand ourselves through the literature of the ancients. The biography of the bookshelf and how what we read informs both our taste and our menu. If the Bard is correct to say there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt in our philosophies, then we need a language to describe them. Is this why we write poetry?

There is a degree of meaning that needs language to behave in a quantum fashion, the better to break, bend and shape meaning at the deepest of human levels. This is why Hopkins springs rhythm in verse to dance meaning into our minds. Our pursuit of Scientia happens within and without the language we use to describe it; it is a search for meaning within and without reason or logic, where language is both the ladder and the wall. It is why we think, why we talk. It’s why Joyce abandons punctuation and why his coachman, rounded, stooped, shook music from buckles in ‘Araby'.