Sir Anthony Seldon

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2016

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the educationalist and writer, Sir Anthony Seldon.

Now Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University, he was the Master of Wellington College. He has written, co-written and edited more than 30 books, including political biographies of Prime Ministers Churchill, Blair, Brown and Cameron.

He had to take his 'A' levels twice before going on to read PPE at Oxford and doing a PhD at the LSE, before embarking on his teaching career. His first headmaster job was at Brighton College and then he went onto be Master of Wellington College. During his tenure, the school became co-educational, set up partner schools in China, and introduced a more holistic approach to learning with happiness classes and stillness sessions added to the curriculum and in 2009 the state secondary Wellington Academy was founded in Wiltshire.

He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2014 was knighted for services to education and modern political history.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My cast away this week is the educationalist and writer Sir Anthony Selden.
0:39.0	If I tell you he spent nine years as master of one of our most eminent public schools and that among the 30 books he's published are biographies of four British Prime Ministers.
0:48.0	You may imagine you already have the cut of his jib.
0:51.0	Listen up. His is not a textbook existence. He thinks power rarely
0:56.8	confers happiness and admits to periods of profound anxiety. He flunked his A-levels,
1:02.2	dabbled in hedonism and confesses to having at times been
1:06.0	seduced by glamour and wealth. In addition, he claims to abhor what he calls the
1:10.7	educational apartheid of the British school system, encouraging us to care a little less
1:15.8	about sitting exams and a little more about sitting in the Lotus position.
1:20.2	He's a devotee of yoga and meditation.
1:23.0	He says, I've always been pragmatic.
1:26.0	I've always been emotionally on the left and intellectually on the right
1:30.0	and always had a sense that you need both aspects.
1:34.0	So welcome Sir Anthony Selden.
1:35.7	You're an award-winning teacher.
1:37.4	You're a highly acclaimed headmaster.
1:39.8	You're now Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University. and you say that if we show youngsters respect they always rise to the occasion now I think that is
1:49.3	Surprisingly optimistic for somebody who spent a long time in education. Do you think it's really true?
1:55.2	Absolutely certain that it's true. It's always the case that your most difficult child in school is difficult because they feel bruised and rejected, but you give
	...

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