The School of Life

Invitation to The School of Life Open Day

Saturday 5 September 11.00 - 18.00

If you've been curious about The School of Life and would like to meet the people behind it, this is your opportunity! 
 
Staff and faculty will be on hand throughout the day to tell you about our five essential courses on Love, Work, Family, Play and Politics. Our bibliotherapists will offer taster sessions.  There'll be a Virtual Travel Clinic where you can find out about our upcoming holidays, and our Life Lessons stall will dispense philosophical ideas on matters as eclectic as telling the truth, finding the right job, making resolutions and falling in love.
 
The School of Life’s Open Day is part of the Marchmont Street Festival.  Entry to The School of Life is free. 

Alice Rawsthorn on Good Design

Ahead of her secular sermon for The School of Life on Sunday June 28, International design critic Alice Rawsthorn, puts out a call to arms for young designers.

The numbers seem nutty. There are 6.5 billion people on this planet, 90% of who can’t afford basic products and services. Half of them, nearly 3 billion people, don’t have regular access to food, shelter or clean water. Yet whenever we read, or talk, about design, it’s invariably about something that’s intended to be sold to one of the privileged minority – the richest 10%.

The £1 million chaise longue. The super-smart phone. The fast car. The beautifully bound book. The elegant typeface. The cute digital device.  Museums, books, magazines, and blogs are stuffed with them. Tens of thousands of designers devote their working lives to producing more.

 

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. No one forces billionaires to pay £1 million for chaises longues at gunpoint, and I can’t pretend to feel the least bit guilty about loving beautiful books. But when you look at the bigger picture, doesn’t it seem odd that so much time, energy, talent and resource should be devoted to creating luxuries for relatively few people, when so many more people are in desperate need of designers’ skills and ingenuity?

 

More and more designers, mostly young ones, are addressing that need by designing everything from emergency housing, water purification devices, cheap forms of transport, educational resources, to new business initiatives for “the other 90%”. They are also tackling the problems of mature economies like our’s by working in collaboration with other disciplines such as anthropology, economics, ethnography, psychology and the social sciences to develop new solutions to acute social problems in areas like crime, education, healthcare, housing, joblessness and ageing.

 

At the same time, the combination of the economic recession and environmental crisis is prompting designers to re-assess the value of their conventional projects. Many of the values that underpinned design in the 20^th century are now redundant. Technology is no longer seen as a panacea. New things aren’t necessarily better than old ones. Big isn’t always best. Why buy something when you can borrow it for a time, before passing it on? Then there is the realisation that most designers’ work will end up rotting – or worse, failing to rot – in landfill sites? And that the design phenomenon of this year, iPhone apps, was dreamt up by amateur designers, not professionals.

 

If you look back historically, design has always flourished in periods of change. It is an agent of change that can help us to understand the changes in the world around us, and to interpret shifts in science, technology, culture and the economy into things that can help to make our lives more efficient and enjoyable. This is a time of unprecedented change, when those shifts are accelerating as are the extremes of speed and scale that confront us daily, while the social and political systems that once ran our lives are collapsing.

 

All of this creates extraordinary opportunities for designers, if they embrace a new approach to design – one that is more fluid, responsive, collaborative and inclusive. They will have to win over an increasingly demanding and knowledgeable public. They will have to design intangible formulae, as well as things, and then devolve responsibility for how them. Designers will also have to accept responsibility for ensuring that their work can be disposed of as responsibly as it should have been sourced, manufactured, sold and shipped. And they must focus on the needs of the under-privileged 90%. If they succeed, we will have a new definition of “good design” – one that has less to do with chairs, and more with the aspects of design that really matter.

To book tickets for Alice Rawsthorn's sermon on June 28th, click here.

Simon Jenkins on the lure of the live

Simon Jenkins' comment piece in Saturday's Guardian exploring the extraordinary public appetite for live performance highlighted by the success of the Simón Bólivar Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall last week, is certainly borne out by our experience at The School of Life. Our Secular Sermons on Sunday mornings now draw a crowd of over 500, eager for good ideas delivered with palpable passion. When most churches can barely scrape double figures for their weekly attendance, and media experts tell us the future is all on online events, what exactly is going on?

Jenkins calls it the “magnetism of human congregation..... which invites the audience to speak, to think, to make up its mind and to vote.  .... The more leisure we have, the more we want to escape the tyranny of screen and earpiece, the now ubiquitous workstation. Theorists seem unable to handle this want, because its technology is old-fashioned, that of live sound heard by a live community of enthusiasts in real time and place."

Read his full piece here.

Maurice Glasman on why Orwell got it wrong

It is sixty years since George Orwell published 1984. Maurice Glasman asks whether it has really been as prophetic as it’s cracked up to be.

George Orwell’s 1984 has failed to stand the test of time.  Twenty five years after its projected moment of realisation, the type of totalitarian repression he envisaged may help us grasp the condition of a Chinese Communist Party functionary who has fallen out of favour but does not give us the conceptual resources to capture the type of threats to liberty and integrity that confront us in Britain today. 

 

As a conservative patriot working in a socialist tradition, Orwell was concerned with threats to the type of society Britain was becoming.  ‘Big Brother’ is a scary concept but it is not at the heart of what is at stake here today.  The booing of Andy Burnham at the Hillsborough Memorial at Anfield yesterday expresses a rage and contempt that people feel towards politics and politicians that is nowhere captured in 1984.  The threats to society that people fear, such as environmental degradation, market failure, immigration or Islamic contestation do not feature. 

 

It is true that millions of people live a life of atomised powerlessness when confronting forces that are definitively beyond their control.  The force which confronts them, however, is not a Single Party Prison State based upon constant domestic surveillance, common activities and Supreme Leader devotions all co-ordinated through a central government of such integrated omnipotence and knowledge of each citizen’s secret fears that resistance of even the most personal type is met by the slavering jaws of wild black dogs that attack you in the night. 

 

The force is something very different.

 

There is indeed a culture of almost constant surveillance and most of it is carried out by family members and friends who record as many moments of one another’s lives as they can.  The police are held to account by a citizen’s army of mobile phone cameramen who document every moment.  The State cannot hit its targets for teenage pregnancies or literacy, political participation or tests for cervical cancer.  Even the might of the Great Hegemon’s Army is made to jump around Afghanistan by a bunch of enraged peasants with Kalshnikoffs.  Blowing away three teenage pirates is heralded as a great success in a whole array of global wars.  Meanwhile the State finds itself subordinate to the demands of finance even to the extent of using its own resources to keep them in their position of dominance. 

 

The most effective forms of public manipulation and mobilisation are not to be found in the public sector, or politics at all, but in advertising campaigns and branding.  The State is more than capable of losing personal data, but only the private sector will sell our most intimate financial details on to unscrupulous fraudsters for a profit.  Totalitarianism is found far more forcefully in private sector team bonding sessions in which you either commit yourself publicly to obvious bullshit or risk losing your job.  The obtrusiveness of line management and the risks associated with not being a team player are forged most furiously when making money is at stake. 

 

The type of closed society that Orwell envisages is also inconceivable in a society characterised by internet access, satellite television and immigration.  The black dogs that attack you in the night are far more likely to belong to people traffickers or drug dealers than the secret police.  Orwell’s failure to envisage the power of the market, the incompetence and subordination of the state and the increasing insignificance of political parties in people’s lives deserves some reflection. 

 

Orwell’s conceptual imagination was shaped and formed by the dreams and nightmares of the Left.  From Wigan Pier to Catalonia, from Animal Farm to 1984 the concern is the same. If the problem for Conservatism has always been that of how to stop the market undermining the family, the locality and integrity of inherited institutions, then the problem for socialism has always been that of how to stop the State nationalising society and then making it redundant.  Orwell envisages an entirely monopolistic state,  a supreme leader leading a single party through the repressive apparatus of a dominant State with collective coercive power over all its citizens.  Any form of Hard Left politics that had this type of political arrangement as a vision of the good is now only of any consequence in public-sector teaching Unions. 

 

Orwell was right that society would become atomised and sedated, he was right that abstract forms of communication would feed a permanent sense of displacement and powerlessness and he was right in 1948 to observe that Statist socialism was the biggest show in town.  Where he was wrong was in his assumption that capitalism had been beaten. 

 

Maurice Glasman will be discussing the failure of such a dream for the Left and for our society as a whole with Phillip Blond in Red Tory vs Blue Labour, a debate organised by The School of  Life next Wednesday 22^nd of April at Conway Hall, London WC1. Find out more here.

 

Maurice Glasman will also  be teaching the next Politics course at The School of Life starting Thursday evening 30 April. Find out more here.

Red Tory vs Blue Labour

A battle is being fought for the centre ground of British politics. Ideological divisions between the two main parties seem to be melting faster than the financial system or the polar ice caps. The School of Life is adding to the heat, by hosting the most vital debate of the day: Red Tory vs Blue Labour.

With both Thatcherism and New Labour in disgrace, the ideological cross dressing of the last thirty years has changed and intensified. Cameron’s Conservatives increasingly identify themselves with the National Health Service, educational opportunity and stronger local government. Labour meanwhile remains in thrall to the City of London, while strengthening its policy on Law and Order and presenting itself as the most effective defender of Britishness and the British State.

Speaking for the Red Tories is Phillip Blond, director of the Progressive Conservatism Project at Demos. He will argue that only a revived Conservative tradition drawing inspiration from Burke, Disraeli, Chesterton and Belloc can challenge inequality, restore a sense of home and place and provide real security for people in times of crisis. Blond's brand of Red Toryism decisively rejects markets pretending to be free when in fact they are private sector monopolies, and far from insisting on a powerful state, argues for power to be restored to local communities.

Waving the flag for Blue Labour is Maurice Glasman, Director of the Faith and Citizenship Programme at London Metropolitan University and faculty member of The School of Life. Glasman will argue for a deeply conservative socialism that places family, faith and work at the heart of a new politics of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity. The debate will be chaired by Professor John Gray, Britain's foremost political philosopher whose widely influential books include Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals. Find out what is really at stake in how the two great political traditions of Britain make sense of the role of finance in civil society. And discover the battleground over which the next general election is sure to be fought.

The debate takes place on Wednesday April 22 at 7pm at Conway Hall, WC1. Tickets cost £10. To book call 0207 833 1010 or e-mail info@theschooloflife.com

Nigel Warburton on Free Speech

Philosopher Nigel Warburton will be wading through the thickets of censorship, hate speech, offensiveness and human rights this Friday at The School of Life. Find out more about the event and about Nigel's new book on Free Speech here.

Nigel has also created an invaluable web resource of podcasts, articles and links around the topic. Listen to his contribution to the new Thought for the World series, in which we argues with reference to the Geert Wilders case, that offensive views can have an unexpectedly beneficial side-effects.

 

Laurence Shorter in search of the brighter side of life

Let’s face it; January 2009 isn’t looking to be the most joyful month in recent history. The combination of bad weather, continuing global crisis and rising unemployment are likely to get even the cheeriest among us feeling a little glum. To add to the gloom, we've just discovered that today is "Blue Monday", officially the most depressing day of the year.

If you,like us, haven't heard anyone say they feel "optimistic" recently, come and listen to Laurence Shorter talk at The School of Life tonight. We've invited him to instill a bit of hopefulness into us ahead of Obama's inauguration. He'll be talking about his new book The Optimist, which charts his ambitious, year-long quest to seek out the world’s most positive thinkers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jung Chang, Matthieu Ricard, California’s renowned Surfing Rabbi, and Bill Clinton. But even for Laurence, optimism doesn’t come easy. If your love life is in trouble, you are worried about losing your job, or your relationship with your parents has still not recovered from Christmas, rest assured he's been there too.

Find out more about tonight's event here. Read an interview with Laurence here.

Neil Astley on why we need poetry

Poetry in Britain is both thriving and struggling: it is flourishing at grass-roots level while poetry publishing is floundering. Bookshops have drastically reduced their ranges of poetry. Publishers have scrapped or shortened their poetry lists and are taking on very few new authors. Small presses have folded. Yet, paradoxically, public interest in poetry has never been higher.

More people write poetry than go to football matches, and poetry is popular in schools, at festivals and at the hundreds of readings staged every week in pubs, theatres, arts centres and even people's homes. Poetry has reached a wider audience through films, radio, television and the internet, as well as through initiatives such as London's Poems on the Underground, which has been imitated around the world. More people than ever believe, as Jackie Kay wrote in her National Poetry Day blog, that "poetry makes us think about who we are".

Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. These comments first appeared in the New Statesman - read the full article here.

Laura Barber, editor of Penguin's Poems for Life and former Penguin Poetry Doctor, will be prescribing verse at The School of Life tonight Thursday 15 January at 7pm. Click HERE for more information.

Mark Vernon on why The School of Life is reinventing the sermon

Sermons have almost as bad a reputation in the UK as late night talk shows on BBC Radio 2. There's the vicar, "six foot above contradiction", displaying all the arrogance of the religious and their ghastly sermonising. Verbose, haranguing, waffle: these are the synonyms that come to mind. Samuel Pepys sarcastically wrote that they were "good, honest and painful".

And yet, are we missing a trick in rejecting the sermon? John Wesley launched Methodism on sermons, along with all that followed, from stirring hymns to the Labour party. In the US, the sermon never died: it is the chief characteristic of the political rally. Where would Barack Obama be if he did not understand the charisma of the church preacher? His mix of religious rhetoric and secular aspiration is the wellspring of his success.

Malcolm Boyd commented that some of the best sermons he ever heard were in the theatre. In similar vein, there is a new experiment being pioneered by The School of Lifeto reinvent the sermon, or invent the secular sermon. Tom Hodgkinson was the first of the lay preachers. The editor of the Idler campaigns against the work ethic, and chose as his text, "Love thy Neighbour". He delivered a discourse against usury which, he argued, is the opposite of neighbour-love. For most of human history making money from money, as opposed to investing it in something real, has been regarded as a sin. Why? Because it is ripping off your neighbour: it "dulls the edge of husbandry" as Shakespeare put it; it destroys community. Thus the Bible commands: "Take no usury off him, that thy brother may live with thee," and Ecclesiasticus adds: "Be not a beggar by banqueting on borrowing". Read a transcript of the sermon here.

Hodgkinson's oration was littered with such Bible quotes, and yet, the last person he sounded like was a Calvin or Spurgeon. It was as if the best words of the good book had been liberated. They could speak afresh for our times when unencumbered by hellfire and damnation. The surprise was that the sermon format genuinely worked for delivering a substantial, life-challenging message. Standing around afterwards, with a cup of tea and a copy of the parish newsletter, the secular congregation admitted he had a very good point.

All this shouldn't be taken too seriously, of course. But then maybe that is the point, and there could be a lesson in it for the churches. People want to hear spiritual ideas, demanding ideas, ideas that make a difference. And the sermon is an excellent way to deliver them. It is just that the barriers around church-going are often too high or prescribed.

Secularists might feel more kindly towards the sermon if they knew that the ancient Greeks practiced a form of such preaching called the diatribe. It was probably invented by Bion of Borysthenes, a cynic philosopher of the third century BC. The diatribe was a form of shadow-boxing for an audience, posing rhetorical questions, parodying opponents. A glimpse of Greek Sunday mornings in the marketplace, standing around Bion's lectern, can be caught from the handful of his sayings that remain. One day he caught sight of a wealthy citizen in the assembled crowd, and retorted: "He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him!" On another, he felt his congregation weren't paying enough attention and chastised them with a cry: "You want barley when what I brought is wheat!"

So bring back the sermon! Geoff Dyer will be preaching on punctuality this Sunday and The School of Life have a host of key cultural figures taking to the pulpit in 2009 including Sam Roddick on Seduction, Alain de Botton on Pessimism, Robert Winston on Curiosity and Richard Wiseman on Humour. For details or to book click here.

Mark Vernon is The School of Life's expert on friendship and a member of the teaching faculty.

On the pleasure of talking to strangers

Last week we launched The School of Life’s conversation meals at Konstam in King's Cross. The restaurant is known for its seasonal and locally sourced cuisine and as Nina Caplan (Time Out’s features editor) wrote, “everything was sourced from within the M25 except the topics for discussion”.

The principle behind the meals is simple – all of us know how difficult it can sometimes be to strike up an interesting conversation with a stranger, but most of us would admit that it can provide the opportunity to really see things freshly. The School of Life provides diners with a specially designed conversation menu – containing tasks, pictures, quotes and questions to help stimulate conversations about things that really matter in life. “It has the potential to be excruciating, but actually it’s tremendous fun”, Nina Caplan discovered, ‘there are tasks to accomplish, aphorisms to discuss with the aperitif, questions to bat across the table with a stranger through dinner, postcards to ponder over dessert."

The meals have proven hugely popular with bookings now being taken for Spring 2009. Read more about the concept and find upcoming meal dates here.