Enrichment ages 10+
The Ascham Fellowship brings a fresh approach to liberal education. We offer an intellectually aspirational programme, promoting inquisitiveness into, love for and deep understanding of our cultural heritage. We tailor our seminars and courses for the different cohorts we take on, so we always have something to offer students of any age and any skill set.
At the Ascham Fellowship we believe that education is valuable in itself, and that the character it forms is even more important than the grades it yields. The sort of education that used to be commonplace, education that taught students about humanity itself through close study and great works, is now gone, or the preserve of the elite.
Most education now is more of a box-ticking exercise than a true attempt at developing a young mind. More often than not, a pupil will spend their school years bouncing from classroom to classroom with no coherent sense of why they are learning what it is they are learning, or of how one subject relates to another. Looking to models of education from the classical European tradition, we aim to counter this with a holistic and sophisticated approach to learning, centred on the great works of Western culture.
The Ascham Fellowship brings a fresh approach to liberal education. We offer an intellectually aspirational programme, promoting inquisitiveness into, love for and deep understanding of our cultural heritage. Our thematic approach fills in the gaps that modern education leaves, exploring the crossovers and harmonies between disciplines and fostering a more dynamic, wide-ranging and culturally aware mindset in all our students.
We start from the beginning, looking at Plato, Homer, Cicero and all the roots of Western thought.
Great thought has always inspired great literature, and we track it through the ages, looking at culture, criticism and connections.
Thinkers and artists are always shaped by the world around them, so we make sure to cover the whole continuous story of the evolution of the Western world.
From music to painting to cathedrals, we examine some of the world's finest artistic achievements, the people who made them and the culture that gave rise to them.
No history of thought is complete without the history of science, and we look into the web of connections that have linked the sciences, humanities and arts throughout history.
Our approach draws on the wisdom of the two most ancient and prestigious universities in England: Oxford and Cambridge. They prioritise interviews over grades in the admissions process, and conversational methods over lectures when it comes to teaching.
Our key aim at The Ascham Fellowship is to cultivate this agility, giving pupils the tools, confidence and fluency to contribute to and reap the rewards of scholarly conversation. The small-class format directs learning across two dimensions, student-teacher and peer-to-peer, which enables the seminar to draw flexibly from all sorts of perspective, not just those pre-prepared by the instructor.
Having studied this way ourselves, we know the benefits well and seek to pass them on to all our students, not just to prepare them for university applications, but for intellectual life.
“There is in this world no real delight but the exchange of ideas in conversation.” — Samuel Johnson
Places are limited to keep seminar groups small. Get in touch to see if it's the right fit.