Scholarship at St Edward’s
By the Warden, Alastair Chirnside
Scholarship is an attitude of mind. It means dedication to studies, perseverance in the face of academic challenge, consistent hard work, and a genuine interest in knowledge and ideas.
Gandhi famously said that all scholarship would be in vain if it were not accompanied by the building of character and, consequently, by mastery of thought and action. It is for that reason that scholarship sits alongside excellence and service among our principal aims for pupils.
The acquisition of knowledge is not the point of education, but knowledge does matter. Without it, understanding of the world is impossibly difficult and the answers to the problems of the present and the future will prove elusive. Connections between ideas and the inspiration which can follow from making them are best made in the moment; they can be lost in the time taken to search the internet or to retrieve a book from a library shelf.
The acquisition of knowledge is also a habit for life, not for the accumulation of facts but for the curiosity about the world which follows from it. That is most obvious with very young children, from the endless questions which they ask as they seek to understand the world. Parents looking for the answers often wish they had greater knowledge; questioned by my own children, I have often wished that I had paid closer attention in Physics and Chemistry lessons at school. The internet is never a good answer in those circumstances.
More importantly, we encourage children to keep asking those questions as they grow up through their years at St Edward’s, because they are the surest sign of an evolving interest in ideas. We want pupils to leave Teddies interested in questioning the old, in finding out about the new, in making the very most of their humanity.
Scholarship requires ambition and hard work, sometimes solitary, sometimes difficult, sometimes despite the distractions of the moment. The ability to ignore those distractions, to focus on a task and to work with determination towards a goal should be celebrated. Those skills might be developed in solitary study in a library, but they are applicable and valuable in every context, professional and personal.
The sum of human knowledge is more than an exercise in addition. It is a construct of collaboration: the greatest discoveries may have been made by individuals and rightly credited to them, but they have often followed from work done by teams of people working together. The same is true for the evolution of ideas: thinking is by definition a private pastime, but thoughts are shaped by others through reading and through conversation. Scholarship, therefore, requires both creativity and collaboration. Those are the most valuable skills in the workplaces of today and tomorrow, most obviously because they lead to innovation, to new ways of thinking and acting, ultimately and hopefully to new ways of addressing the challenges and issues in our society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that scholarship should not be created by compulsion but by a pure interest in knowledge. Scholarship and school share the same derivation, from the Greek word for leisure (skhole). In ancient Athens, free time was properly used for the discussion of ideas, and the meaning gradually passed from time to place. Schools, and especially boarding schools, are busy places, with an endless range of opportunities for pupils. To serve their original purpose, however, they need structurally to provide the time for ideas to be explored and discussed, then culturally to celebrate such endeavour. Only then will the curriculum, beyond examinations and qualifications, fulfil its true purpose in fostering scholarship, a life-long interest in the life of the mind, a timeless and integral part of our humanity.
Watch the film below to find out more about the academic culture at St Edward’s.