St Edward's Academic Review 2025

ACADEMIC REVIEW 2025

INTRODUCTION Welcome to the third edition of the Academic Review, our annual showcase and celebration of the School’s academic culture. This publication brings together the best essays written by our pupils and their teachers over the course of the year. We hope to instil in our pupils a genuine love of learning – our aim is for them to become scholars in the broadest sense of the word. Learning should not be seen as a chore, not solely a route to success in the next examination or the latest piece of coursework. We want pupils at St Edward’s to see learning as an integral part of their journey to perspective and understanding of the world around them, as the inspiration of intellectual curiosity and the means for its fulfilment. Learning is a lifelong pursuit, both collaborative and deeply personal. Our teachers lead by example, often pursuing their personal academic work alongside their teaching, allowing our pupils to benefit from their individual specialisms and passions. They teach our pupils how to read texts, how to question ideas, how to build connections between the different areas of their knowledge. We are uniquely positioned in this university city to have access to academics who are at the forefront of modern research but who are working within a tradition of teaching and learning with centuries of history. The Super-Curriculum at Teddies allows our pupils to benefit from lectures by eminent professors and visits to the colleges, museums and faculties of Oxford on a weekly basis. There is no way to quantify the value of those opportunities for our pupils to experience and to witness true scholarship. To hear first-hand from those who have dedicated their lives to research in a particular field, driven by a love of subject, is remarkable. I look forward each year to reading the Academic Review, not least because it reflects the diverse enthusiasms of our school community. Read on to learn whether Beowulf should be considered a Christian or a pagan poem, how height affects performance in rowing, to what extent Finnish guerilla warfare helped prevent full occupation in the Russo-Finnish Winter War, and much more. These essays are interspersed with pieces which have been created in our Art Department over the year. The skills and techniques our pupils learn in Art and Design are another lens through which pupils at Teddies view and make sense of our world. I hope that you enjoy this edition and that you will join me in looking forward to the next.

Alastair Chirnside, Warden

The third edition of the Academic Review is the pinnacle of research, writing and art produced over the last academic year at Teddies. With thousands of pieces of extended writing and coursework written every year, the selection process has been rigorous and riddled with difficult decisions. I am grateful to the authors of this Academic Review, and I congratulate them on their achievement of having their work published.

Charles Wallendahl, Director of Teaching and Learning