School subjects are inter-related—we must teach them accordingly

The question I have wrestled with in my time as Head Master of Westminster School is: what do we really want for our young people as they finish their secondary education?

Looking back over developments in recent decades, I consider that we have applied Utilitarian principles to education. How useful are the acquired skills? What are the career prospects of candidates? How can society benefit most directly from an educational service that is largely funded by the taxpayer? These are the questions that have underpinned a system which atomises learning, separates disciplines and encourages specialisation. Meanwhile older generations wring their hands on the sidelines, lamenting the fact that if pupils head down the scientific path, they are led away from any knowledge of history—national or international—and that an arts or humanities path leads to a lamentable ignorance of basic science.

As an historian I turn for inspiration, not to the Utilitarians satirised by Dickens in Hard Times, but to one of my great heroes, WE Gladstone. Four times Liberal Prime Minister and a Chancellor who delivered twelve budgets, Gladstone read voraciously throughout his political career. In opposition he wrote lengthy review articles on some of the most controversial books of the day and wrote several books of his own, ranging in subject matter from Church and State to Homer. More extraordinary is the fact that, when in power, he kept up his habit of daily reading on a wide range of topics. Gladstone knew that decisions made in politics, and indeed in what were known as the "liberal professions," had to be based on a rich intellectual and cultural hinterland, for him grounded in Christian tradition, in the Classics, in Dante and in world literature. How many of today’s politicians and leading professionals can measure up in terms of their hinterland?

Late in life Gladstone decided to make his extensive library available to others. He wanted to make books that lacked readers accessible to readers who lacked books. So 32,000 of his books formed the basis of what is now Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden, Flintshire, where the Grand Old Man’s principles are bearing fruit educationally over a century later. With a quarter of a million books at one end of a grade one listed building and 26 bedrooms at the other, the Library, of which I’m a Trustee, welcomes readers of all sorts and conditions. To enter the room in which his books are shelved is to enter the mind of Gladstone, richly stocked, flexible, always on the move.

Gladstone the reformer assumed that knowledge was universal and that all intellectual activity was inter-related. School education in Britain took a great leap forward with William Forster’s Education Act of 1870, during Gladstone’s first premiership. And today Gladstone’s Library is on the brink of an exciting new phase in its development. While continuing to attract established scholars, clergy, writers and researchers who wish to pursue their own work or attend one of the many courses at the Library, the plan is to broaden our appeal and to provide greater access to a wider group of people. More and more local A-level students and undergraduates are using the place, browsing not only the shelves but also each other’s projects and thinking at mealtimes and over coffee, a special feature of the Library. We want to provide modern meeting rooms and an exhibition space for a new generation of visitors, the aim being to introduce them to the principles of liberal education through contact with a great polymath of the nineteenth century. We also intend to create a national forum for debate on the liberal values which inform Britain’s constitution and on which our future depends, irrespective of political party.

At Westminster School, as at Gladstone’s Library, we espouse liberal educational values. I believe that a technologically savvy generation of pupils needs a more balanced and a more humane education than is generally available today. What I will say to my own school at the final Assembly of this school year? I could do worse than quote Gladstone, who wrote: "Be inspired with the belief that life a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as best we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny." And I will say to my pupils, "When you are busy fulfilling your future calling, don’t forget the hinterland."