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