The Internet threatens to become one of Great Bore Debates. So far, I see very much more in its favour than against. It is a blessed relief to receive essays which are immediately legible, after years spent ruining my eyesight on the depraved cursive of most adolescents. The new Computer Room is bright, light and busy: the boys and girls look enthusiastic whenever I go in there, and this bucks me up.
People get very Luddite about the Internet, and its most militant opponents even millenarian - the Internet marks the death of books, an enemy of scholarship, preparing the way for a new barbarian age etc etc. I certainly agree that a terrific amount of drivel gets into the ether which wouldn’t end up any further than the reject file of a respectable publisher. This is a worry if a pupil attaches any credulity to it, but it isn’t in my experience a very big problem. Moreover, let me speak the truth which dare not say its name and say that many academic books are appalling - some so turgid as to be unreadable. Four or five hundred poorly written pages need to be expertly leafed in order to come up with two or three unexceptionable ideas. If that’s scholarship, why should it be defended?
The Internet undoubtedly takes away some of the more autistic elements of scholarship. I see nothing more inherently virtuous in scanning shelves/contents pages/ indexes of books in chasing up a subject than in getting an Internet Browser to do it more efficiently and better. A mantra becomes easily attached to the rituals of scholarship, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily good.
The real worry isn’t the process (ie high-tech as opposed to books), but the maintenance of scholarly standards themselves. Every age group nowadays reads books more reluctantly and less patiently than ever before, but reading intensity began to die with television, and is nothing whatever to do with the Internet. I am genuinely shocked by the vocabulary of some pupils, which seems to be startlingly malnourished. Their affinity to the nuances of text is often less finely honed than it would be if reading were an unselfconscious, daily event in their lives.
Reading, once it becomes a habit - and a pleasurable one - can be extended, by degrees, into more difficult and oblique areas. This is the raw material of much scholarship. It doesn’t seem to me to signify one bit whether the reading happens on a VDU screen or between the folios of a book. The mindset is what matters: immersion in works of genuine scholarship teases one into a series of critical responses, but it takes time and stamina.
There are assets to this process which will make it more efficient - the Internet is the most important of these for centuries, so many argue. But no prodigious talent was ever exploited without much repetitive labour and harsh self-examination, and no amount of hi-tech can ever change that. The pursuit of academic excellence is a rigorous and moral business, but also a journey of self-discovery.
The First XI Cup Tie against Bolton last October drew almost unprecedented crowds to the touchline at Vincent Square. Instead of the usual ten to twenty, there must have been two hundred or so. Some of these were pupils instructed to go and watch, but there was nothing lacking in spontaneity in either the support of the crowd, or the commitment of the team. When Bolton scored the first goal, late into the match, both team and crowd rallied behind the First XI goalkeeper; minutes later, Westminster had scored an equaliser. The team was euphoric, and the crowd scarcely less so.
We have often been disdainful of the this kind of ‘team spirit’. Perhaps it would be more truthful to say we have often not been able to evoke it, even to the extent of drawing supporters to the touchline. This indifference is not restricted to sport: anybody involved in the Arts at Westminster will know the frustration of giving weeks or months of your life to preparation for a performance, only to discover a paltry sized audience. In the case of plays, there is a habit of ‘coming on the last night’ which is a mixed blessing, especially if it means a nervous cast spending the first two performances talking largely to empty spaces, while the last night resembles the Black Hole of Calcutta. People go to plays when their friends are in the cast, and the play is either familiar or, on reputable authority, known to be funny. House football matches, for these understandable but parochial reasons, attract a crowd commitment and presence much larger than many School matches. In the case of classical music, even friends turn granite hearted. In a recent straw poll in my Sixth Form, four people were involved in the Choral Concert in Abbey in March, but none of the rest of the set attended.
How do you cajole people to extend their sphere of interest? To turn up to a football match? Go to the School Opera? Visit the Carleton Gallery to see this year’s entries for the Takashi Funaki Prize? To do so because, however much or however little you understand of what’s going on, the architects of what is before you are your contemporaries, and their skill and commitment should command your respect?
Experience tells me that if you market something adeptly enough, you eventually get an audience. The worry is that it’s too often the same audience. Running the John Locke Society parallels what is going on elsewhere: about 25% of the Upper School are diehard attenders, another 50% come if it the speaker is sufficiently famous (note - a merely ‘distinguished’ speaker commands no such ready audience) and the final 25% hardly show up at all. The same 25% doesn’t go to plays or concerts.
There’s no clear answer to this but I do maintain we enjoy and understand everything in our lives more, the more we attend to what’s going on around us. Any solutions for how to draw in the untouchable last quarter gratefully received.
A major effort is underway to track down recent pupils at Universities all over the country. The idea is to canvass their opinions about quality of courses, tutoring, lifestyle. None too soon, many would say. Most of the old certainties surrounding graduate employment have disappeared, but University remains the invariable destination of virtually all Westminsters. Their motives for going are often practical, but negative: (i) a decent degree from a well regarded University is virtually essential for most, even if the way into the world of work is more oblique than it once was; (ii) everyone else is.
I think another critical shift concerning Universities is that it no longer spells freedom to school-leavers in the way it did twenty years ago. I hope I was an affectionate son and brother, but there were few sweeter moments than the one when I knew I was saying goodbye to my family for eight weeks at the start of University term. A generation back, living at home meant keeping rooms tidy(ish), curtailing social life around family meals - and only one TV in the house. Put like that, you can see how thousands of eighteen year olds shivered in delight at the prospect of nestling down in a cell in some breezeblock Hall of Residence. A cell, maybe, but your very own cell - and adequately removed from patriarchal authority.
Nowadays, there is a kind of pupil who approaches University entrance in severely materialist terms. The choice, whatever the UCAS form may say, has mentally narrowed down to Oxbridge or London at an early stage. On the strict understanding that a College has status, its Quadrangle rustic charm, and the trains to Paddington leave on the hour, they might consider an application. Should the University authorities lack imagination (inexplicable, but so common, alas!) and fail to come up with an offer, no provincial University need fear an approach from this metropolitan sophisticate. Mummy is making over (and, good God, even doing up) the basement flat in Lansdowne Road especially. Halls of residence are for the provincial anoraks.
True, there’s a measure of burlesque here - but only a little. The more prodigal and libertine the home, sophistication takes the place of wisdom, and the less likely University will be what it ought to: a time for rich and plentiful experience, beyond anything School can offer. Clearly there are courses and colleges at London University which are pre-eminent. But it is surely desirable for virtually all OWW to live away from home when doing their first degree. In their first weeks of University, they should try steer as clear of other Westminsters as they can. Strange people (even seeming anoraks) and unpromising situations can metamorphosise within days (or weeks) into something new and splendid. To make that happy discovery, we have to throw away the lifebelt of familiar faces.
Most of our pupils recognize this danger and deal with it perfectly well. Indeed, many are doing a good deal about it well before they leave School. Some know London far more fully and adventurously than their teachers and parents - with friends and interests quite distinct from the sober rhythms of the School term. But it is a truism that Westminster pupils are, in some ways, critically unprepared for University. The honeyed diet of School and home can lead the unprepared into premature disillusionment. Their best prophylactic, by far, is to be studying a course and at an institution commensurate with their best abilities. But once they’re there, they should get on with it. No more gilded passage - youthful independence and resiliences should kick in now.