Language & learning
The ESU is committed to creating international understanding through English at a time when English has become the working language of the global village. This unprecedented expansion in the use of English has happened for many reasons including the political changes in East and Central Europe, the arrival of a global economy and the spread of the Internet. English has become indispensable for the world.At the heart of the ESU’s response is the role of English in public speaking, discussion and debate. International understanding is created by the exchange of ideas and experience through the medium of a common spoken language. Hence the ESU’s Centre for Speech and Debate at Dartmouth House. Hence our International and National Debating and Public Speaking Competitions involving hundreds of universities and thousands of schools worldwide. Hence the innovation of Internet Debating and the vast range of individual scholarships, internships and exchanges organised by Dartmouth House. All this is reinforced by international conferences and vigorous current and cultural affairs programmes in London including the prestigious Churchill Lecture.
The ESU in London works in partnership with ESUs worldwide. Founded originally in 1918 to help bind together the English-speaking peoples of the United States and the Commonwealth, today the ESU has spread to more than fifty countries including most recently several in Asia, and many of the nations of Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. In the USA and the UK, the ESU has many membership branches supporting and participating in its international work.
The ESU is a registered charity, dependent financially on the generosity of its members, individual donors and corporate sponsors. It is investing in the future with the restoration of Dartmouth House and its re-equipment for the age of Information Technology. Its charitable and educational purpose is clear with an increasing focus on the challenge of social exclusion in Britain and elsewhere. Its contribution in the Twentieth Century is acknowledged from that of its founder, Sir Evelyn Wrench and of Winston Churchill, one of its first chairmen, to the rapid expansion of the 1990’s. Its opportunity and obligation in this, the 21st Century, is to open up the prospects of human achievement through English to as many people as possible worldwide.