THE UPPER SCHOOL SYMPOSIUM 2013 SOCIETY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
WILL COOK (YEAR 13) T he theme of this year’s annual Dulwich College Symposium was ‘Society and the Individual’. It is a unique day, in which boys in the Sixth Form go off timetable to see a number of lectures that allow them to grapple with the big questions and ethical dilemmas simply not permitted by the everyday grind of an A-level syllabus. Boys could choose to attend talks by their own teachers or by a number of prestigious outside speakers, including Mark Littlewood, Director of the Institute for Economic Affairs, science journalist Matthew Chalmers; and Dr Lawrence Ratnasabapathy, Consultant Psychiatrist at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital, who amused and intrigued the us in equal measure with his talk on violence in the film A Clockwork Orange . This year’s subject may have led primarily to talks on sociology and economics, but this was by no means the limit of the eclectic mix of seminars, which included, among other topics, Dickens, physics, mathematical probability and World
Wrestling Entertainment. The two sessions which I attended, one on personal identity and the other on the free market, were memorable not only for the speakers themselves but also the lively questions and discussion that ensued among students afterwards. The Upper School came together as a whole in the Great Hall after lunch to see two speakers talk about video games, a subject often dismissed in the media as being culturally and intellectually worthless. Tomas Rawlings, creator of ‘Endgame Syria’, and Ken Eklund, the man behind ‘World Without Oil’, were both able to explain lucidly how their field of expertise was actually a serious medium through which to explore the social and political developments of the 21st century. I came away from the day feeling enriched by what I had heard, and am sure that other students felt the same. It stands out in the College calendar as a day that truly exposes you to the kind of high-level thinking and discussion students at other schools might not experience until university.
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