“Ruskin's concern for art education applied to the development of the power of the hand and eye for everyone." -- Professor Robert Hewison

John Ruskin was probably the greatest British critic of art, culture and society of the nineteenth century, in addition to being an educator. He believed that art and the development of imagination were profoundly important to an individual’s education. Ruskin was Oxford University’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art. I recently had the pleasure to connect with Professor Robert Hewison after reading his illuminating book, Ruskin and Oxford: The Art of Education. “Ruskin believed that everyone had visual as well as verbal capacities that needed to be developed in order to become a complete human being, and that the apprehension of truth depended on the power of observation,” explained Hewison. “His concern for art education applied to the development of the power of the hand and eye for everyone, not just people who hoped to become professional artists.”

My curiosity to discover more about John Ruskin’s legacy found me outside the great doors of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art on Oxford’s High Street.  Would Ruskin recognize all the practices that went on there today, I wondered?  I had the pleasure of discussing this with Dr. Jason Gaiger, Head of the school today and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

"Drawing and painting are not just about producing beautiful objects. They are also about learning to look, and to learn to look is to learn to understand." -- Dr. Jason Gaiger

Jason, would you say John Ruskin’s legacy is evident in the Ruskin School today?

Ruskin’s legacy is not evident in the way that is sometimes thought.  He has the historical status of being a great Victorian figure, so people sometimes think that the School is a very traditional center of painting and drawing techniques.  In fact, it is a contemporary art school.  Students here study everything from installation, performance, and video art to the latest multi-media technology.  But they also have a strong grounding in traditional art skills.  One of the things that makes the Ruskin distinctive is that it is now the only art school in the country where students still draw from the cadaver, made possible through the close connection with the School of Pathology here at the University of Oxford.  There are also life-drawing classes that are open to the students and to other members of the University.

Where does the school fit in under the larger University of Oxford umbrella?

The School was founded in 1871 and was originally housed in what is now the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology.  The students at that time would draw from the casts and the sculptures there.  For a long while, the School was not, perhaps, central to the main concerns of the University and it didn’t have degree awarding powers.  In 1974, it moved from the Ashmolean to the current site on the High Street.  In 1977 it was fully incorporated and the degree course was introduced, becoming a classified BFA honours degree in 1991. Equally importantly perhaps, all the students now have a college association.  That means although they study here at the Ruskin, they also belong to one of the colleges, whether it be Christ Church or St. Edmund Hall or one of the others.  Students here are being trained to be artists.  However, because they are studying at the University of Oxford, their experience is different from that of students at some of the London art schools who can sometimes be trapped in a fine-art bubble where they only encounter other art students.  Our students share college facilities with people who are studying a range of subjects across the University. Art is as much about ideas as it is about physical materials, and here at Oxford, students have direct access to a treasure house of ideas.  The University is an incredible source of knowledge that artists can draw on and allow to feed into their art practice.

"New technology is definitely on the rise and students are of course interested in the possibilities it opens up." -- Dr. Jason Gaiger

What are your thoughts on the amount of focus given to the arts in K through 12 in the UK?

What we find during the admissions process is that students who come straight from A level (secondary school) aren’t always ready to study art at degree level.  A school education is not usually enough and students generally need to do a foundation course after secondary school to bring them to the appropriate level.  There may be a few exceptions of incredibly gifted students or students who have received unusually good support in the secondary school they have come from.  An underlying question here is whether visual intelligence is valued in the same way as verbal intelligence in secondary schools.  The Ruskin is perhaps unusual in that, as well as a strong portfolio, students need to get the same high A level grades as for any other academic subject at Oxford; the same criteria apply whether you want to study fine art, medicine or law. At the Ruskin, 25% of the BFA degree is in the history and theory of art, which means that a substantial part of the program is academic as traditionally conceived. We tend to attract students who are both verbally and visually gifted.  But in the portfolio we’re really looking for potential.  I think that’s where we feel we are not given the support we would like from secondary schools.  Fine art teaching in secondary schools often takes the form of set projects.  All the pupils in a class are given the same specified tasks to complete with the result that the work they produce ends up looking rather similar. In other words, the students’ individuality has not been fully developed.  For this reason, we always interview candidates and ask the students to talk to us about the work they have produced.

"Ruskin believed that everyone had visual as well as verbal capacities that needed to be developed in order to become a complete human being." -- Professor Robert Hewison

What do you believe the role of the arts should be in education today?

It troubles me when the arts are treated as something supplementary or merely ancillary to the university’s core activities.  My own view is that the arts are just as intellectually rigorous, just as demanding and just as exacting in their standards of excellence as any other field of learning.  The students here at the Ruskin don’t feel they have any less standing than their peers working in other subject areas.  As I mentioned, there is a substantial academic component to the BFA degree involving the study of art history and theory, but the studio-based component of the degree has its own intellectual value.  Art does not have to rest upon the traditional methods of academic learning in order to justify itself as an independent mode of enquiry.  Perhaps the appropriate comparisons are not to be made with other humanities subjects. The sorts of activities that take place in the studio are quite dissimilar to the largely text-based research that takes place in the history faculty, for example. But there may be points of commonality with the forms of research that take place in science labs or among mathematicians. We need to recognize that there are many different forms of rigorous intellectual enquiry (like studio art) that don’t involve sitting down and writing essays.

One of the leading education systems in the world – Finland – is planning to increase the number of hours allocated to the arts in secondary education.  Does that surprise you?

It doesn’t surprise me.  There is a difference, of course, between the attempt to develop a more holistic approach to educational development at school level and the inevitable degree of specialization that takes place at university. By the time students come to Oxford, they have already elected to study a particular subject.  However, we encourage students not to isolate themselves in a specific discipline.  One of the advantages of the collegiate system is that it allows students to make connections across disciplinary boundaries and thus to acquire a much broader sense of what constitutes knowledge. I strongly endorse providing greater support for the arts at school level. Drawing and painting are not just about producing beautiful objects.  They are also about learning to look, and to learn to look is to learn to understand.

"The arts are just as intellectually rigorous, just as demanding and just as exacting in their standards of excellence as any other field of learning." -- Dr. Jason Gaiger

Technology has changed the arts enormously.  How do you view the benefits and the challenges of this change?

Here at the Ruskin there used to be a large print making department.  It was a slow, rather time-consuming process and the equipment took up a lot of space.  Today that process has been replaced in part by the use of computer imagery and digital software such as Photoshop, though print making still remains.  There is an element of organic evolution in this.  New technology is definitely on the rise and students are of course interested in the possibilities it opens up.  However, you still have to learn how to use the technology and even then the technology is not going to do the work for you. We encourage students to acquire the necessary skills to enable them to do what they want, but without becoming slavishly dependent on acquiring skills that aren’t deployed for some purpose. The world is full of people who are technically accomplished but this doesn’t suffice to turn them into artists.  Nonetheless, technical skills are indispensible. Let me give you an example. Someone may have the most wonderful ideas for building a large-scale sculpture, but unless she has learned how to construct it properly, perhaps through making a maquette, she does not yet know whether it will be sufficiently stable to carry its own weight.

For more information about the Ruskin School

Dr. Jason Gaiger and C. M. Rubin

Photos courtesy of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art.

In The Global Search for Education, join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (US), Dr. Leon Botstein (US), Professor Clay Christensen (US), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (US), Dr. Madhav Chavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (US), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (US), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. Eija Kauppinen (Finland), State Secretary Tapio Kosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Professor Ben Levin (Canada), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (US), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (US), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (US), Yves Theze (Lycee Francais US), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (US), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.

The Global Search for Education Community Page

C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair award, “The Global Search for Education” and “How Will We Read?” She is also the author of three bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland.

Follow C. M. Rubin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cmrubinworld

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If the top British universities, Cambridge and Oxford, are serious in their plans to increase class diversity of their student bodies, the first thing they need to address is the fact that their “toff” image could be a turn-off for talented students who don’t come from upper-class families. Professor Robert Lethbridge, the Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said that if the schools don’t take a second look at how they present themselves to the nation, they’ll continue to be easy targets for both politicians and demagogues decrying “social immobility and inherited privilege.”

Lethbridge’s comments come as a response to a recently published report by the Sutton Trust that found teachers from state schools who are reluctant to advise their best pupils to apply to either of the two prestigious schools, on the grounds that they were too elitist. The findings have bolstered the repeated attacks by the government that the universities weren’t doing enough to enroll more graduates of the country’s state schools.

But Prof Lethbridge insisted Oxford and Cambridge could not “try any harder to reach out to applicants to every background in this country and every kind of school”.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he said: “I think we need to constantly stress that, at the very top of our education system, we are utterly meritocratic. We need to counter the self-deprecatory dimension of Englishness and we need to no longer retail the Brideshead Revisited, toff image of Oxford and Cambridge which some uninformed people find as a lazy target.”

Lethbridge delivered his remarks as part of a celebration marking a ten year anniversary since the first students graduated from a program, funded by a £210 million donation by the Gates Foundation, to help promising international pupils attend Cambridge. Since the program’s establishment, over 1,000 students have completed a period of study at the university, and every year it attracts over 4,000 applicants for only 90 available spots.

Lethbridge contrasted the eagerness of international students to aim for the best, with the anti-intellectual attitude that seems to prevail in Britain. He blamed the “no one should fail,” mindset for continuing attacks on both schools.

Prof Lethbridge said political parties had a “particular prevalence for choosing statistics which suggest social immobility and inherited privilege” at Oxbridge but insisted that “every politician’s statement on this subject over the last 10 years has been shown to be factually incorrect”.

He added that unless the universities themselves worked harder to dispel the erroneous image of the schools, talented students were bound to continue to hesitate in choosing Cambridge or Oxford as their university. People had a completely wrong idea of the atmosphere prevailing at the schools, he said, something that was obvious from the reactions of new students upon their first arriving on campus.

“When students come to Cambridge, they are absolutely astonished that it bears no resemblance to what they saw on TV and we have got to change that image.”

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Elly Nowell, 19, said she felt like “the only atheist in a gigantic monastery” when she visited Magdalen College for her interview. She subsequently decided to withdraw her bid to read Law at the university.

The Telegraph reports that in a ‘parody’ of the kind of rejection letter universities often send to unsuccessful applicants, Miss Nowell launched a withering attack on the college whose alumni include Oscar Wilde, King Edward VIII and George Osborne, which she later posted online.

The college has a fierce reputation. In 2000, Magdalen refused a place to Laura Spence, a former comprehensive pupil with five As at A-level to her name. The decision was described by the then-chancellor Gordon Brown as an “absolute scandal”.

Miss Nowell, a former pupil of Brockenhurst College, Hampshire, wrote:

“I have now considered your establishment as a place to read Law (jurisprudence).

“I very much regret to inform you that I will be withdrawing my application.

“I realise you may be disappointed by this decision, but you were in competition with many fantastic universities and following your interview I am afraid you do not quite meet the standard of the universities I will be considering.”

A spokesman for the university said Miss Nowell had withdrawn her application on the UCAS system shortly after her interview and emailed the college informing them of her decision.

“The application was withdrawn before she would have been aware whether or not her application had been successful.”

In the letter, Miss Nowell made it clear that it was her experience at her interview that had put her off. Under the subheading “Guidelines for Re-application”, she wrote:

“While you may believe your decision to hold interviews in grand formal settings is inspiring, it allows public school applicants to flourish and intimidates state school applicants, distorting the academic potential of both.

“It was while I was at interview that I finally noticed that subjecting myself to the judgment of an institution which I fundamentally disagreed with was bizarre.

“I spent my entire time there laughing at how seriously everything was being taken.”

She added, dryly:

“Perhaps offer a glass of water in your interviews next time; it is rude to torture guests.”

An Oxford University spokeswoman said:

“Despite what the candidate said, we would point out that the actual admissions figures speak for themselves: of the seven UK students who received offers for law and joint school courses at Magdalen, only one was from an independent school.”

Nowell said she hopes to study at University College, London instead.

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Baroness Kennedy has accused dons at the UK’s most prestigious universities of being obsessed with traditions and “mad pecking orders”

The QC, who was elected a head of Mansfield College earlier this year, suggested admissions tutors were vulnerable to well-spoken applicants from fee-paying schools at the expense of those from the state sector.

Earlier this year, deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg accused Oxford and Cambridge of failing to create a socially-balanced student body, and warned them to ensure “British society is better reflected” in their admissions to justify their state funding.

Oxford defended its admissions policy, citing it has “more generous” bursary package awards than any other university. However, just 14.4 per cent of Oxford undergraduates were eligible for a full state grant, compared with around a third of students nationally last year.

This breaks down as despite only representing just seven percent of the student population, pupils from private schools made up four-in-10 places.

Baroness Kennedy, a Labour peer, speaking to Times Higher Education magazine, said tutors: “are very easily suckered by what they perceive to be the excellence before them”.

“[There are] all sorts of mad pecking orders and who sits where at tables and all kinds of nonsense that they seem to love,” she said.

“But it will slowly but surely bite the dust.”

“There is a madness about that kind of minutiae. If you’re a scholar who is plumbing the real depths of a subject, it involves…narrowness. It can start to dictate how you see the world.”

A spokeswoman for Oxford said the university was committed to fair access.

“Oxford is committed to selecting candidates based on ability, not background – and ensuring that background doesn’t prevent anyone with an offer from coming here,” she said.

“The university’s financial support package for 2012 speaks to this commitment by offering the most generous support package to the poorest students, no strings attached.’

This comes as schools minister Nick Gibb claimed that the current culture of expectation is breeding unrealistic dreams of wealth in young people, citing a “destructive” perception of success, writes Rowena Mason at the Telegraph.

In a Commons debate about whether children should receive a better financial education, the minister said that millions of children were raised with the wrong priorities:

“The ‘got to have it now’ culture means young people have high aspirations for branded or designer goods, often without the means to pay for them. People have unrealistic expectations about the lifestyle they can afford, fuelled by the glittering trappings of celebrities.”

Mr. Gibb wants to see schools put a greater emphasis on math teaching, suggesting that some people might have avoided crippling debt if they had been taught about interest rates at school.

“We all have a job to do in moving young people’s aspirations away from this empty and often destructive perception of what success means,” he added.

“Developing children’s intellectual capabilities and interests is a direct antidote to materialism.

“Alongside that, young people must acquire a sense of responsibility. They need to contribute to society as responsible citizens and not take wild risks. They need to learn to live within their means.”

The education minister’s attack on the “got to have it now culture” was made just weeks after Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, denounced a culture of egotism.

“The values of a consumer society really aren’t ones you can live by for terribly long,” the Chief Rabbi said.

“The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs [the founder of Apple] coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTune, I, I, I.”

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