Probably Britain's oldest centre of learning and important across the whole of medieval western Europe, St Illtud's monastery and school at Llantwit Major, south Wales flourished from c.500 AD to the Reformation. This is the first detailed history of the Celtic Christian community there - one of the greatest untold stories in British history.
The chasm of difference between the British and Japanese education systems sparked my interest in the early days of degree: I wanted to explore if one could learn lessons from the other. I wondered whether the militaristic style of Japanese Education, churning out competent workers year on year, benefits the individual as much as the State. Are they collective individuals perhaps? As an undergraduate thesis, I could only scrape the surface of a fascinating topic; nevertheless I concluded that Britain could in fact be educated by a system it modelled itself.