American School of London - 17th September 2025

This week saw very impressive sessions across our ASL clubs.

In one of the middle school sessions, we had a lively, informal debate about fame to start. It was fantastic to see students confidently applying some of the tactics covered, such as asking rhetorical questions and appealing to their audience’s imagination. Some students argued against their personal views, and did this well.

‘Skill of the week’ was looking at unseen images, this time a portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the younger. Quite quickly the students moved away from discussing facts to thinking more creatively about their responses. Some skillfully drew comparisons between a Tudor artist portraying a character as being supremely powerful with instagram, airbrushing and AI.

Others drew on points made earlier about fame and about topics in the news.

We also worked on rebuttal whilst debating ‘Is the age of essay writing over?’ and there were many interesting mixed opinions about this. 

On newsround we discussed the death of Charlie Kirk and the reaction that it caused. We had a brief chat talking about the opinions of different political parties and also how social media impacts current affairs. We further talked about President Trump’s current visit to the UK and how that has been received. 

One of our main debates this week looked at the motion 'This House believes that Art is more important than Sport', with some really great points raised, even by those who had never debated before. The key focus this week was on including rhetorical questions in their arguments, in order to enhance one’s point. 

This topic led us onto the discussion of more controversial artworks and we spent some time looking at Banksy’s work which destroyed itself at Christie’s. We ended the session looking at a Pollock painting and exploring people’s opinion on whether they liked it or not.