Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
[Henry's essay was victorious in the school's History Essay Prize 2021, in the Sixth Form Category] HENRY PEART The Stasi - perhaps the greatest and most efficient secret police agency ever to have existed - spied on and tormented nearly the entire population of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also "East Germany") from 1950-1990, and successfully kept an incredibly unpopular government in power for 40 years. However, the days of the police state (in Western Europe at least) are over, and so the questions that arise are those of how we rehabilitate those who have had their lives destroyed by the Stasi, and how we rehabilitate those torturers and the complex web of informants that made the police state a reality. Perhaps more importantly, how should we judge the Stasi through our modern lens of constant criticism of the past, and is the current German state doing enough to make up for historical state-sponsored horrors? This essay will provide a brief overview of t...