Education and history: a lifeline in troubling times

Healing wounds

There is always a context behind violence and abusive behaviour. People who hurt others are wounded people. Understanding the context involves diving into history; both that of the perpetrator’s life experience and that of their specific socio-economic circumstances.

For instance, to understand gang culture among young black people in London, you have to understand the systemic inequality experienced by their community, derived from a history of racism, empire and slavery.[1]

That doesn’t mean we should accept bad behaviour from others, far from it. People need to take responsibility for actions they have committed.

However, understanding the context that leads a person to commit violence or abuse can lead to forgiveness and, essentially, an ending to the cycle of violence that may otherwise continue. Learning forgiveness (and tolerance for others more generally) can help us to heal our own wounds and come to a place of acceptance.

We may walk away from the specific person who hurt us and learn to create greater boundaries along the way, but we can find greater happiness and healing once we find acceptance and forgiveness. This has been my own experience in life and one I have observed in others.

Understanding context is key, therefore, to healing wounds and having a solid grasp of history can help us to understand why people do the things they do. We live in a society and while one person’s abuse may appear isolated, scratch the surface and patterns will emerge, traceable within social and global history.

Our current circumstances

We live in an age of increasing social inequality, oppression, misinformation and political disengagement with the struggles of ordinary people. Indeed, politicians now seem wedded to big business and corporations, placing the concerns of the wealthy few above the needs of the many.

As people are feeling more and more squeezed economically, working longer hours for less real-time wages, mental health and quality of life is plummeting, leading to increasing “domestic” or inter-personal violence and abuse.

Added to this, it’s become challenging to know where to seek accurate news and information, as the same elite who are skimming off the cream for themselves, are increasingly controlling the media. What can we do?

The power of history

State supported historical amnesia is contributing to widespread social problems within Britain and its former colonies, leading irrevocably towards Britain’s shift towards far right politics and fascism.

There was a time when I didn’t believe this was possible but I learned, thanks to my tutor Hilda Kean at Ruskin College, that fascism is always possible when history is obscured and marginalised and when scapegoats are found for people to blame.

The problem is that the school curriculum for history fails to cover content that is relevant for young people to situate their life experience within a wider social context. History is still weighted towards the ruling classes and a patriotic view of the British empire.

As many indigenous people have pointed out, if the history you learn at school doesn’t include the experience of your own people, you feel unworthy and forgotten. If your family are struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table, learning about the many wives of Henry VIII is not only irrelevant but demeaning.

There are many stories we can tell about our past. What we choose to focus on matters. For instance, if we choose to emphasise the ultimate success of the anti-slavery movement in isolation to the greater context of Britain’s role as the world’s biggest slave trading nation, then we create a false narrative around what actually happened.

This tends to be what is taught in schools, despite the evidence. It’s a selective view of history serving a nationalist view of Britain as abolisher rather than perpetrator of slavery.

It’s never wise to ignore or bury the truth, especially around trauma – it always re-emerges. The misrepresentation of Britain’s role in slavery and of the British Empire, along with downplaying the role of the empire in creating geo-political inequality, has led to widespread acceptance of the political right’s blaming of migrants for people’s socio-economic problems today.

Gaining control over the historical narrative gives rulers greater control over people, which is why dictators attack educational establishments and burn books. Currently Trump is doing just this in America.

The way to change the situation is to provide widespread access to libraries and a decent education – especially in the subject of history.

Ruskin College

Ruskin College in Oxford was a powerful educational institution that was, no doubt, a thorn in the side of the mainstream political establishment for many years. It opened in 1899 to provide education to working class men (and women, later) and created many key members of the emerging Labour Party, including MPs. In the 1970’s it instigated and became home to the women’s liberation movement.

When I attended the college in the late 1990’s, Ruskin offered a fully funded yearlong residential course in central Oxford, studying for a diploma that enabled entry into University. That in itself was a lifeline to those without formal qualifications but it offered much more than that.

Ruskin was a radical, left-wing college. Whilst there, I studied the history of working class people - my people. I learned about the radical, socialist and feminist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries; people who had fought and continued to fight oppression.

I devoured Marx and anarchist literature, learned about slavery, the impact of colonialism on the colonised and the history of animal rights. This was not the history I was taught at school; it had far more relevance.

It wasn’t just what I was taught though. I studied alongside people who had campaigned at Greenham Common, fought in the miners strikes of the 1980s, lived within the Irish “troubles” and survived racist attacks.

Ruskin changed my life. When I applied, I was at the bottom of a downward spiral and by the time I left, everything had changed.

I had learned the ideology behind the prejudice I had experienced all my life; how a girl from a council estate wasn’t expected to be clever. I had learned to situate the trauma I had experienced as a social consequence of my birth and stopped blaming myself. I began to break the cycle of socio-economic oppression that I had experienced during my life.

I lived at the Walton Street building in the photo above. It’s location in central Oxford was essential. As students, we were given access into the very heart of Oxford University via the prestigious Bodleian Library, only a few streets away, which we were given permission to enter after a sworn declaration that we would not burn it down.

I have so many memories of the college building at Walton Street. Of walking within corridors and halls decorated with TUC banners and paintings of key figures and events from the Labour movement.

I remember Tony Benn’s speech in the main hall, puffing on his cigar under a large “do not smoke” sign. During this speech, while everyone cheered and clapped, outside England had just voted in another Tony, with a very different view of the Labour Party.

Those were incredible days where we felt invincible, yet I wonder if the writing was on the wall even then for the future of Ruskin College.

The founding of Ruskin was, in part, inspired by the fictional tragedy of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, which highlighted the social and economic impact of preventing working-class people from attending Oxford University.

Down the road from the Walton Street building is a pub called ‘Jude the Obscure’. While it gives a nod to the college, Ruskin no longer exists on Walton Street, the building having been sold in 2010 to Oxford University’s Exeter College.

Ruskin College today

I went back to Ruskin in 2002 to give a paper at its Public History Conference and in 2005 I taught a course there in anthropology. Though it was clearly changing, embracing new subjects and new ways of gathering students, I never anticipated that Ruskin would close or change. When I left, it was with the expectation that I would return.

It’s just a building… maybe. But during the process of the Walton Street building being sold, the historic banners and pictures that publicly displayed the successes of the Labour movement were moved and, crucially, archival evidence related to Ruskin’s ancient alumni were recklessly and needlessly destroyed.

In theory, Ruskin College continues to exist today. Yet this radical, left-wing college was moved from the heart of Oxford to its secondary building located on the fringes of the city. The college has declined ever since and nowadays it has become a branch of the University of West London.

While Ruskin maintains the logo, it bears little resemblance to its former self. It continues to offer opportunities for people to gain qualifications to go to University, but there is little funding to enable them to do so. Back in the day, it was the funding that made it all possible. And the radical teaching in politics, history and feminism has disappeared. What is left feels corporate, token, reduced. The Ruskin that I knew is gone.

Moving forwards

That Ruskin changed people’s lives is not in question. However, it does not need to become a relic of the past. In a time of growing elite power and oppression, we need colleges that offer funded educational alternatives to the mainstream. Opportunities for people to do their own research and find out the truth. This is what Ruskin, together with access to the Bodleian library, offered.

We need to make education accessible once more. We need to teach people foundational knowledge of their history, of the history of power and the struggles against it. We need to give power back to communities, teaching skills to enable them to thrive in an uncertain world.

Learning history and politics is, of course, only one element. But it is important. Only time will tell the consequences of the loss of Ruskin. I pray that with a new principal, its story will change for the better. But in a time when Schumacher College also recently closed, I am writing this as a plea to the web-of-life to honour education and breathe new life into these amazing institutions once again. We all need the hope and the capacity for healing that they provide.

Samara Lewis, January 2026

[1] I would recommend reading Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire to gain a deeper, first-hand perspective.