OVERVIEW

To celebrate the centenary of the Oxford PPE degree, this summer the John Locke Institute is coming to Balliol College, Oxford, where the famous degree was first taught exactly one hundred years ago. We solicit applications from many hundreds of students from every part of the world. From that pool we invite the most intellectually curious, academically ambitious, and open-minded to join us in Oxford for two weeks to pursue an interdisciplinary curriculum of philosophy, politics and economics.🤔 

The inventive, interactive learning methods, the high-calibre academics, and the exceptional peer group will push you to develop your listening ability, refine your reasoning skills, and enhance the clarity, precision and persuasive power of your writing and speaking.

CURRICULUM

The PPE summer school covers ethics, metaethics, logic, political theory, history of political thought, political economy, micro and macroeconomics, maths-for-economics, and game theory; our interdisciplinary curriculum uses the material and methodology of each subject to illuminate the others.

You will certainly return from the summer school much more knowledgeable, and yet we are less concerned with communicating information and more interested in helping you to develop a valuable and sophisticated set of skills. You will learn how to listen generously, how to question, doubt and challenge, how to reason logically, and how to express your arguments clearly and persuasively.

We will give you a deeper appreciation of what you don’t know, and help you to test what you think you know in order to bring to light any unexamined assumptions. We hope to ignite your passion for learning, strengthen and refine your thinking skills, and cultivate the kind of intellectual humility that enables you to learn from people even with whom you disagree.

OUR FACULTY

Most of our professors and preceptors come from Oxford or Cambridge, or leading US universities. They are all brilliant, and some of them have a global reputation; you will notice that they love ideas and they love to challenge and inspire bright, curious students. Many of the Institute's faculty members are classical liberals, of one form or another, but we like to bring into the mix a wide range of ideological positions, from egalitarians to anarcho-capitalists. Introducing our students to counterintuitive claims, advocated by credible exponents, is guaranteed to make them think.

• World-class tutors & tailor-made curriculum - Most of our Summer School tutors are current or former academics from the University of Oxford, and most of the teaching is in groups of eight to ten students, or Oxford-style tutorial pairs. Unconstrained by any external syllabus or by stifling mark schemes, we use our academic freedom to kindle in our students a genuine passion for the subjects we study.
• Study alongside a diverse group of exceptional students - We’re proud to say that we attract students of the highest calibre; being surrounded by so many other ambitious and talented people is a large part of the reason you will find our summer school so special and so rewarding. We welcome applications from bright, creative students from fourteen to nineteen years of age.
• While most people on the course are British or American, you will meet students from every part of the globe. The diversity of background, opinion, and culture is stimulating and enriching, and will challenge all kinds of narrow parochialism.
• The perfect preparation for university - We know that many of our students are about to submit applications to highly competitive universities, and there is no better way to spend part of your summer than with us. It will demonstrate your serious interest in the subjects you hope to study as an undergraduate, and it will introduce you to ideas, concepts and arguments that will enrich your UCAS personal statement or enliven your Common App admissions essays.
• For students planning to apply to either Oxford or Cambridge, the intellectual challenges you experience and the skills you develop will directly contribute to your performance in any admissions interview.
• An area steeped in history and culture... The Summer School is based in a magnificent mid-eighteenth century château set in a substantial woodland estate. Since its construction by Jacques-Jean le Couteulx du Molay, the château has had a rich and varied history, and was commandeered by the German army during WWII, which intended to use the grounds as a launch site for V-weapons.
• Ten miles to the east of the château is Bayeux. Its spectacular eleventh century Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Bayeux, was where William, Duke of Normandy, made Harold Godwinson swear an oath to support William’s claim to the throne of England. This far-reaching episode, which resulted in the Norman Conquest of 1066, is immortalised in the exquisite seventy metre long Bayeux Tapestry.
• ..in a historically fascinating part of the world - To the north we'll be visiting the D-Day landing beaches, where seventy-two years ago thousands of brave Allied soldiers re-routed the course of history. Amidst the now tranquil and picturesque setting you can see the remains of the engineering feat that was the artificial Mulberry harbour of Arromanches-les-Bains, or the nine thousand graves of the American servicemen, just above Omaha Beach, who lost their lives in Operation Overlord.

About being a student at the John Locke Institute

How does attending the Summer School help with my applications?

In three ways. Firstly, some universities want to know what kinds of things you have done in recent summer vacations. Attending an intensive academic course is a good signal about your interests and your motivation. Secondly, you may find that your learning experiences with us will give you valuable material to introduce into your admissions essays, helping to distinguish you from other students whose academic experiences have been narrower and shallower. Thirdly, the skills that you develop at our summer school are very valuable in helping you to perform well in interviews. If you are applying to Oxford or Cambridge this is particularly critical, but if you have an 'alumni interview' with a US college it also helps.

What have students gone on to do and achieve?

Most of our alumni succeed in being admitted to the first-choice university. Very many students from former years went on to Oxford, several to Cambridge, and a good number were admitted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and Chicago.

How are the networking opportunities?

Many of our alumni keep in contact after leaving us and we can often see interesting conversations on our Facebook page, or on pages set up by our alumni to continue the friendships and the debates that began in France. In our summer school, students build strong friendships and we have seen internship opportunities being presented to students via other students who attended the summer school.

Our alumni are often very generous to our incoming students. Many times our alumni have had Skype conversations with students asking for admissions advice. And many times our alumni have offered detailed careers advice, and introductions to key people in interesting companies, to our students.

When is the application deadline?

There is no deadline, but places are strictly limited and allocated competitively. Apply now!