John Locke PPE Summer School 2025
The John Locke PPE Summer School in December 2025 brought together students from the UK, US, South Africa, and Singapore for a week of intensive seminars on philosophy, politics, and economics. I knew it was going to be intellectually demanding. What I did not expect was how much the people would shape the experience. Disagreeing seriously with someone from a different country and political background, and finding that the disagreement itself was the point, was something no classroom had prepared me for.
The academic sessions were taught by Dr Nick Tasker and Mr Martin Cox. They shared an approach: they pushed you to think more rigorously by asking the next question rather than giving you the answer. The seminars went further than most classroom environments I had been in. The point was not just to understand the arguments but to reconstruct them accurately, including the ones you disagreed with. That discipline turned out to be the most useful thing the week taught me.
The week culminated in the Ideological Turing Test, a public-speaking competition in which participants are randomly assigned a philosophical position and have to defend it convincingly. Mine ran counter to my own views. Preparing for it forced me to take the opposing argument seriously rather than just strategically, to understand why someone who sincerely held that position would find it compelling. Being named Best Speaker was satisfying, but that is not what stayed with me. What stayed was the realisation that you cannot argue well against something you have not honestly tried to understand.
The conversations outside the classroom were just as formative. Walking around Clarke Quay late into the evenings, we disagreed about justice, inequality, and governance long after the sessions had ended. What struck me was how differently the same ideas landed depending on where someone had grown up. Political theory stopped feeling like an academic exercise. It started feeling like something with real stakes. A week like that does not resolve the questions it raises. It just makes you more serious about them.
