Independent on Sunday

HERMIONE EYRE in The Independent on Sunday, 28 September 2008. Read the article on their website here.

We know that the unexamined life is not worth living. But how best to do the examining? Academia can be dry as old bones, self-help gooey as jelly. In this information age where everything is available, nothing seems worthwhile. Where and how should the enquiring mind enquire?

This is where the School of Life comes in, offering radical new ways to help us raid the treasure trove of human knowledge. Some of our leading intellectuals are founder members, but before you sneer – this is Britain, after all, where de Botton-baiting is practically a national sport – let us step into its premises in Bloomsbury. I defy you not to be enthralled.

It is a dinky, old fashioned shop set up like a cerebral apothecary, a sweet shop for the brain. Go in with an ailment (recurring Sunday-night back-to-work terror, for example) and you will be supplied with useful cultural resources – perhaps a few choice texts on the topic (Trotsky's Appeal to the Toiling Oppressed Exhausted Peoples of Europe, say, or Studs Terkel's Working). Present an aching heart and you would be directed to the shelf marked "For those who have fallen unexpectedly and profoundly in love" (Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse is prescribed). You could even sign up for a six-week course on "Love" (£195), rumoured to include one session co-hosted by a priest and a Relate sex therapist.

"It's all about cutting to the chase," says the school's director, Sophie Howarth. "And asking: what keeps people awake at night? The aim is to give them all the conceptual and historical apparatus they need to think it through. And because the ideas are so big – Politics, Death, even Love – we need to wear them lightly." Hence the playful touches around the shop, such as the tiny model academics in jam jars (£5) that point to the availability of one-to-one time with an expert (£50). Then there's the Bibliotherapy service (£50 for five months), which includes a diagnosis of your reading rut: "Symptoms: too much Harry Potter. Prescription: three comic novels this month, one every month thereafter...."

Another innovation is the conversation class, held over dinner at a nearby restaurant. The menu starts with canapés and aphorisms, leading on to main courses of personal revelations, and ending, perhaps, in petit fours and aperçus.

Howarth's inspirations include McSweeney's Superheroes' Supply store in Brooklyn (your first port of call for capes, grappling hooks etc), the artist Hannah Hurtzig's Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge (an information-swapping art event) and Cafe Scientifique (informal science debates taking place across the world). Oh, and Plato's Academy. "Even though, as a woman, I wouldn't have been allowed in, and I get the feeling it would have been full of semi-naked clever clogs."

For a voraciously erudite public pedagogue (she set up the massively successful events and studies programme at Tate Modern), Howarth is also a bit of a laugh. You can see why Toby Litt, Alain de Botton, Grayson Perry et al would want to work with her. "It's a bonkers project, but at the same time totally sane," she says. "The history of human ideas is a great big bumfundling mound that belongs to all of us. It is our heritage. Why shouldn't we be able to access it in a way that matters to us, right here, right now?" '