The world’s most beautiful schools.

The headline of the article I have read is “the world’s most beautiful schools”. It was written by Jonathan Glancey and published www.bbc.com, 3 November 2015.

The main idea of this article is to show some beautiful schools in UK and that a classroom should be a place of “wisdom and happiness” rather than stress and fear of failure.

The author stars by telling, that a classroom should be “a place of wisdom, happiness – and beauty”. The first place is Stowe in Buckinghamshire. This school was founded in 1923, in the one of the England’s most romantic country estates threatened with demolition at the time. But it was saved, after a spirited fight led by the architect Clough William-Ellis, it was turned into a school. According to the article, John Fergusson Roxburgh, Stowe’s founding headmaster, said that it would be a school where every pupil would “know beauty when he sees it all his life.” The school, in Buckinghamshire, has landscaped gardens by Capability Brown studded with enchanting follies to classical buildings by a pantheon of great 18th Century English architects.

         The second place is Lagoon of learning. The author says, that “Beauty can be found in the least privileged settings”. This is a poor place, it has been threatened with destruction by politicians and officials who see it as an illegal settlement. Now, with a school that has won admirers worldwide, Makoko is a source of pride for an increasing number of Nigerians.

What do you thing about colleges of Oxford and Cambridge? The author considers that the beauty as well as the practicality of the medieval colleges attracts attention of many people. A lot of undergraduates choose a college like Magdalen, Oxford as much for its beauty – its medieval cloister and tower designed by William Orchard and its later Palladian and Victorian additions set by the River Isis back onto a timeless deer park – as for its scholastic virtues.

Mr. Jonathan underlines, that the most delightful places of learning have always been lined with books. Trinity College, Dublin has the Long Room of the Old Library. Our can wander among the shelves. There are a great barrel vault crowning alcoves of leather-bound books set between busts of prominent philosophers and literary giants.

The author points out, that оne of the most exquisite campuses in the United States is that of Scripps College, a liberal women’s college founded in 1926 by 89-year-old Ellen Browning Scripps in Claremont, a small town of ‘trees and PhDs’, 35 miles (56 km) east of Los Angeles. “Beauty can be conjured at low cost and in any setting, urban or rural”.

According to the article some architects are trying to imbue something of this altruistic spirit in a new generation of British city schools. The brand new, low-cost Hackney New School in East London by Henley Halebrown Rorrison squeezes into an inner-city site cheek-by-jowl with former industrial buildings.

In conclusion the author says, that a school should be a place to learn and to grow.

I found this article interesting, because it gives full information about British schools and colleges, which are untypical for modern society.

Do you want to study in schools like these?