Wykeham Journal 2014 | Page 24

Div is therefore, in many ways, a modern re-flowering of the breadth of a medieval liberal arts education. For him Div is about the unpredictable. It flourishes best when it is unstructured and personal. As an editor of The Wykehamist, he also reaped wider benefits, receiving the output of the quirkier Div tasks, like the two-column newspaper article to be read simultaneously across or down, or three by three by three poem: three lines, three words per line, three letters per word. He is also grateful to Div for introducing him to ‘the banking industry from the Medici to Wall Street’, which saved him from the ignominy of a City career. Ultimately, he muses, Div thrives as an uncategorisable exercise in eclectic learning, and a good Div hour is a pleasant surprise that can lift an otherwise uneventful day. The MacKinnons’ joint and several fusion of humanities and science is something the earliest Wykehamists would have recognised as a fundamentally medieval approach to education. In 1394, Winchester was a ‘grammar school’, licensed by the king and the pope, with a curriculum focused squarely on the seven liberal arts. That meant taking boys aged nine to 12 and starting them off on proficiency in Latin, or ‘grammar’. As William of Wykeham put it, ‘Grammar is without doubt the foundation, gateway, and mainspring of all the liberal arts, and without it arts of this kind cannot be known’. (Greek was not generally taught in Western Europe until after the Reformation, when it became important for Protestant bible study). Once the boys had made a good start at Latin, a grammar school education added the other two elements of the trivium (where we get the word ‘trivial’): rhetoric and logic. Wykeham additionally insisted on proficiency in plainsong and the writings of Donatus, a highlyprized Roman grammarian. 18  The Wykeham Journal 2014 When a man left Winchester at 18, he was therefore armed and ready for university’s quadrivium, in which he learned the more scientific subjects of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Once complete, he finally had all seven liberal arts under his belt, and was a Master of Arts, able to teach any or all of the individual subjects, or embark on higher doctoral study in theology, law, or medicine. Div is therefore, in many ways, a modern re-flowering of the breadth of a medieval liberal arts education. In an age of remorseless curriculum changes and examination imperatives, Div stands as a Wykehamical biting of the thumb to the classroom fads of the day. Div seems always to have been part of the Winchester ethos. For instance, Christopher Johnson (Headmaster, 1561-71) taught the men classical Latin, but in addition he found time to explore with them his own Latin prose and verse; moral discussions of war and avarice; the relative sizes of land-based and water-based animals; anatomy, the digestive system, and the causes of blushing; acoustics; the latest theories about comets; why the sea is salty; and various ideas about the origin of the world. Sitting in the latest incarnation of Co Ro in Old Bethesda, Nick walks me through the current approach. In JP the focus is on the wonders of the classical world. In MP it is time to get medieval. And in Vth and VIth Book it moves deftly into the early modern and modern periods. The way it integrates across the disciplines is inspiring. For instance, Nick’s MP Div on the Anglo-Saxons is immersed in walking the Anglo-Saxon archaeology of Winchester, reading about the city’s defences in the Burghal Hidage, working through the Christianity of Bede, and learning to appreciate the poetry of the Battle of Maldon in the original Anglo-Saxon. In one year, they have covered a vast sweep of the early medieval world, appreciating it physically, spiritually, and in its poetry. But is it still necessary, I ask myself, as I leave Nick in Old Bethesda? Do teenagers today really need this broad exploration of the arts? However, I know the answer already. The MacKinnons have ably demonstrated it. A rounded education offers one the chance to know about, and be interested in, things one would not instinctively study. It fosters a broadness of curiosity and inquisitiveness in the sense Einstein meant when he observed that education is what remains after everything learned in school is long forgotten. For generations Div has offered Wykehamists that opportunity, and it is one we should treasure as a daring, luxurious, and quintessentially radical pillar of a Winchester education. The Wykeham Journal 2014  19