Chavagnes Literary Club

Sunday 21st September 2008, Asch Hall, 8.45-11.30pm.

The first meeting of the Chavagnes Literary Club for the 2008-2009 academic considered the question of why education happens and asked if and how the nature of the process and its rationale may have changed over the last few thousand years.

Mr McDermott opened by the proceedings by reading a paper on the history of education, referring especially to Plato and to the medieval and renaissance notion of the ‘Trivium’ and the ‘Quadrivium’.

Mr Morrison wondered whether a ‘classical education’ ought to be seen as the ideal for everyone, or whether perhaps it was only an option among many kinds of education. Notions of left-wing and right-wing approaches then came into the discussion, to which Mr McDermott reacted by talking about Ruskin’s championing of the ‘great books’ for the working classes. A liberal education was not, he argued about right-wing or left-wing politics; it was about freedom and spiritual/intellectual flourishing, something to which we are all called.

Miss Boyles proved an ardent defender of learning against the onslaught of the barbarian hordes whose malign influence was never far away in the discussion (devil’s advocates, perhaps …?) and she agreed to prepare the next meeting, with the theme of ‘the representation of women in literature’.