Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, and: After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920 (review)

“Gradually, and almost despite himself, Ruskin became relevant,” Stuart Eagles writes in After Ruskin (21). In his vast and varied writings and in his often eccentric personal endeavors, John Ruskin fashioned himself an outsider to both institutions and doctrines. As Sara Atwood explains in Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, Ruskin “existed outside of the mainstream of educational reform” (3). While these deeply informative books use wide lenses to capture the protean Ruskin, they share a single clear perspective: Ruskin is central. And he is central in places where we perhaps wouldn’t expect for a self-proclaimed “violent Tory of the old school,” such as Victorian educational debates and Labour politics of the first half of the twentieth century (Eagles 28).

Atwood considers Ruskin as an educator on multiple levels: as a tutor and mentor to individuals, including several women (such as Louisa Beresford, Anna Blunden, and Ellen Heaton); as a teacher at the Working Men’s College from 1854 to 1860; through his involvement with schools such as Winnington Hall and Whitelands Training College; as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford (where he attempted to implement art education as part of the university curriculum through the Ruskin Drawing School and from where he would resign twice); as the guiding spirit of the Guild of St. George; and as a theorist of education in his final, challenging Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871–84).

Atwood argues that Ruskin’s educational ideals were based on the Law of Help, a Platonic idea introduced in Volume Five of Modern Painters (1860) and described by Atwood as a “principle of composition . . . in which all elements of a drawing or painting work together to produce an organic whole” (50). “Ruskin argues in Fors,” Atwood explains, “for the sort of education that aims at social harmony rather than individual attainment” (143). This ideal operates on at least two levels. First, it seeks to make individuals content with and cognizant of their valued role in society. As Ruskin said in 1857: “My efforts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter” (qtd. in Atwood 53). But it also aims to help students see the connections between their roles. Ruskin encouraged students to work with various collections of specimens (such as minerals, lichens, and casts of leaves), drawings (his own Turner watercolors), and prints, which he often generously donated to schools and museums. Ruskin’s hope was that students would realize the “relations between facts and the ways in which various branches of knowledge work together” (63), a kind of proto-interdisciplinary studies. He also insisted on active, visual learning and resisted competition, specifically competitive exams. Ruskin believed that education was an end in itself rather than a means to an end. This is a compelling vision. But it is also challenging, particularly as his argument is often pitched to those populations (for example, workingmen) who understandably saw education as a way to better their social position. And there’s the rub with Ruskin: he believed in education but not in the social mobility we are so accustomed to associating with education, an association we can certainly trace back to the Victorians.

Then again, as Atwood reminds us, Ruskin’s educational ideals harken back to an earlier time, evident in his most complete educational experiment, the Guild of St. George. Ruskin’s “attempt to create an ideal society on a small scale” was “an idealized version of a real guild” (151, 153), hierarchical in its organization and with a master and companions pursuing endeavors from handicrafts to agriculture. The Guild was something between a reality and a romance. While some plans remained ideas only, the...