Ruskin College

Ruskin College

Ruskin's Rookery building which is now the Ruskin College Academic Building
Motto	"Learning to make a difference"
Established	1899
Principal	Dr Chris Wilkes
Location	Dunstan Road, Old Headington, Oxfordshire, England
Website	www.ruskin.ac.uk

Ruskin College, originally known as Ruskin Hall, Oxford, is an independent educational institution in Oxford, England. It is named after the essayist and social critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) and specialises in providing educational opportunities for adults with few or no qualifications.

The mission of the college has always been to provide educational opportunities to adults who are excluded and disadvantaged, and to transform the individuals concerned along with the communities, groups and societies from which they come, the only change having been to personalise the language (away from ‘the excluded’, who do not sound like people) in line with growing equalities awareness. The mission statement is twofold:

Ruskin tends towards a curriculum that has high social relevance, students who want to make a difference in the world, and forms of academic scholarship and research that are engaged and applied.

Ruskin’s mission is also pursued by means of strong historical links, nationally and internationally, with the labour and trade union movement, other social movements and activism around social issues (e.g., anti-ageism), as well as with local communities, for example through the Social Work and Youth and Community Work programmes.

Ruskin College – originally known as Ruskin Hall, Oxford – was established in 1899 specifically to provide educational opportunities for working-class men, who were denied access to university. It was deliberately placed in Oxford, the city in which its young American founders, Charles A. Beard and Walter Vrooman, had studied, because the city symbolised the educational privilege and standards to which ordinary people could never previously have aspired. It was Walter Vrooman's then wife, Amne (later Amne Grafflin), who financially supported the foundation of the college.

The school was envisioned as a mechanism by which "working-class reformers" could "educate themselves efficiently at nominal cost." Tuition, lodging, and board was priced at 12-1/2 shillings per week (20 shillings = ₤1), with a parallel correspondence course alternatively offered for 1 shilling per week plus a 1 shilling entrance fee. Courses were offered in political economy, sociology, the history of the labor movement, principles of politics, English literature, psychology, and other related aspects of the social sciences.