Balancing Equations and Expressions

18 October 2024

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At the recent HMC Conference in Belfast, the stand-out keynote was from Daisy Christodoulou, one of the country’s leading thinkers on education. Daisy is the Director of Education at No More Marking and the author of three widely-read books on education. She was also captain in 2007 of Warwick University’s winning University Challenge team. Daisy’s keynote at HMC Conference was about the role she saw for the independent sector in championing the Humanities and academic rigour.

More than 100,000 students now take A Level Mathematics annually, a striking figure when compared to the 36,500 who chose A Level English in 2023. The fall in humanities enrolment since 2014 reflects a global trend, driven by students’ increasing focus on return-on-investment in education and the belief that numeracy and technology are the key to future careers. The popularity of Maths is to be celebrated and at NLCS it is our most popular subject. I agreed with the former Prime Minister’s thoughts on everyone doing Maths until they left school. Daisy did too and thought it would be difficult to navigate the world without an understanding of statistics. I agree with that thought too.

But I also agree with Daisy that ‘a beautiful sentence is as useful as a beautiful equation’, the key emphasis being on the utility of language and the beauty of mathematics, aspects we often forget. One summer during the pandemic I embarked on the mission of listening to all the episodes of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. Needless to say this particular project will have to wait for my eventual retirement for its completion, but I do vividly remember one of the earliest episodes. It was a debate between the novelist Ian McEwan and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins about whether poetry or Science was a better way of interpreting the world. Dawkins was arguing that Bach would have produced even more beautiful music if he had had Science as his inspiration rather than God. His point was well-made, that Science is beautiful and inspiring, not merely useful.

In her keynote, Daisy lamented the impact that smartphones have had on reading habits, confessing that she herself found she read less these days because of her phone. And she suspected that this was one of the reasons for the falling numbers of English Literature students. What sad irony is there in the idea that a device designed for communication should have decimated our engagement with some of the greatest communication ever written.

One activity I undertook year after year until the time pressure of headship made it impossible was reading students’ personal statements. I very much enjoyed talking to students about their interests and picked up several excellent book recommendations over the years. In supporting students, I was sometimes struck by how even very able young women could find it hard to explain in plain English what they actually meant. I also reflected on how important it was for schools to teach the skill of complex sentence subordination to help students construct a compelling and cogent argument. I played the role of amateur idiot as personal statement adviser over the years, but in this role, I helped students to clarify and sharpen their meaning. The students who expressed themselves best were often those who had maintained through the teenage years a regular reading habit. Their reading did not just support their expression; it actually expanded their thought.

The expansion of thought and expression is what the Humanities can give our students and why the decline at national level of rates in English Literature should concern us. The Humanities enable us to appreciate nuance, to think critically, to make connections across time and culture. They enable us to engage with the complexity of human thought and emotion, and to articulate our ideas with precision and imagination.

As a school, we recognise the need to equip our students for a world where science and technology play a dominant role, but we also firmly believe in the enduring power of literature, history, and the arts to shape young minds. If we nurture both sides of this intellectual spectrum, our students will leave NLCS as not only problem-solvers but as thinkers, communicators, and, above all, compassionate leaders in a world that needs them more than ever. I’d argue that if students want to stand out in the future, they should consider taking the roads less travelled, not just the highways to success.

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