What is the purpose of this consultation?

We want to understand how we can best accommodate professionals in all circumstances of life to attend our courses.

This consultation inquires about the logistics of seminar attendance, including frequency, duration, and time. We also ask about family commitments and commute, as well as how much you would be willing to pay per course.

The form below is brief and should take maximum 5 minutes of your time. We are grateful for your input at this critical stage in the Ruskin Centre’s development.

Responses are anonymous. See our privacy policy

Who are courses for?

Our target audience is professionals in London and the surrounding area who want to rekindle or deepen their relationship to great books of philosophy, literature, and history.

No prior experience or qualification required.

What will enrolling in a course entail?

A course will comprise 8-10 seminars. The method of learning will be Socratic or question-led and assumes that the text has something of value to impart to us. This is distinct from lecturing, where the teacher shares everything he or she knows about the text. The aim of the Socratic teacher is rather to lead a critical study of the text through strategic questioning. Students will be prompted to defend and refine their interpretation of the text at hand.

To facilitate this, students will be expected naturally to have read in advance the assigned material for each seminar — a chapter or two of a ‘great book’ such as Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.

Why take these courses?

There are a number of advantages to participating in courses over independent reading or listening to podcasts:

• Our assumptions about what we have read can be misleading, especially as moderns trying to engage with works which are hundreds if not thousands of years old. The Socratic or ‘question-led’ method exposes the assumptions which underly our judgments and enables them to be corrected. This helps with technical misunderstanding and also prejudice. We come to see works in a new light.

• Comprehension of a text risks becoming fragmentary. Systematic study under expert guidance encourages us to draw together the whole argument of each chapter, culminating in a grasp of the book as a whole.

• Group seminars provide a variety of perspectives on a text, which again serve to broaden our understanding whilst also challenging us to argue for an interpretation and to speak with clarity.

• You have the opportunity to put your questions about the text to experts.

When will courses be running?

We hope to have our first round of courses running from October 2026 to May 2027, with a second opportunity to sign-up to some of those courses in January 2026.