“The alchemy of learning involves making ideas theatrical,” she said, before a large round table in the school’s basement classroom (“our Wonderworld,” Howarth called it).
The walls were decorated with Lewis Carroll-like scenes by Charlotte Mann, an artist.
“Design is not a trivial part of the enjoyment of how you learn,” Howarth said. “There’s a snootiness in the culture sphere around teaching ‘relevance.’ We have spent a lot of time talking to psychotherapists about the questions people really care about, so that we can provide a broader mental apparatus to decide when you wake up in the morning whether to park on the yellow line or to make up with your dad.”
De Botton sees such instruction as responding to a specifically English problem. On the one hand, he said, there is the exclusionary elitism of ancient higher education.
On the other, for English people, he said “sitting down and talking with strangers about emotional things is taboo, and so we use wit at the school because wit is what the English use when they want to talk about something serious, like the soul.”
Along which lines the school occupies not a formal campus but a modest shop on busy Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury among neighborhood hairdressers, closet-size newsstands and cheap restaurants. The Pasha spa and clinic is nearby, as is a store called Gay’s the Word. The aforementioned chaise beckons from just inside the school’s front window, inviting passers-by to recline with a book purchased from the select few shelves that Howarth daily organizes by shifting categories. The other morning the categories included “Things to Learn About Sex” and “For Those Who Worry About Death.”
The design scheme involves tasteful variations of beige and taupe, along with a few artfully arranged birch trunks. With its bookshelves and a glass cabinet stocked with knickknacks, it looks much more like a curiosity shop than a school.
Leaning on that old wonder-cabinet idea, the school sells US$1.50 postcards of airplanes (an AvAtlantic Boeing 727 on the tarmac at Fort Lauderdale, dated 1992), US$10 bottles of “I Love You” Marmite and posters with aphorisms by, among others, Voltaire and Mae West. (“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”) The frugal can take Tunnock’s Milk-Chocolate Coated Caramel bars, in gold and red wrappers, free from a glass jar.
“The school is sort of pointless, like art, culture, sport and many of the other good things in life,” is how Dyer put it. “We English don’t have your excellent American assumption that the purpose of life is to be happy, that the waiters in restaurants should bring us exactly the food we want, promptly and gladly. We have a much more stoic or Soviet attitude. So the school is a way either of making us happier, ie, more American, or helping us make an accommodation with the shortcoming of our lot.”
London already offers adult evening classes in women’s self-defense, Indian cooking and Hegel. They’re often a good excuse to unwind at the pub afterward. In a way, Dyer suggested, the school brings the pub’s charm into the classroom.
Charm is a matter of opinion, of course. So far the charm of the school seems to be working. More than 1,000 Londoners turned up on opening day, Sept. 6. Spots in de Botton’s Heathrow holiday and a two-day jaunt to the Isle of Wight with the photographer Martin Parr quickly disappeared.
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