John Locke Institute Essay Writing Course (20 Lessons)

An essay writing course on the John Locke Institute Essay Competition (junior prize, 14 and under), focusing on past questions and how to tackle them.

The attached PDF contains a link to a Google Drive folder containing 20 sets of Google Slides, each one a separate lesson (outline below).

To make edits, copy and paste the slides into your own Google Drive.

Part 1

• Lesson 1: Why is John Locke sometimes called the father of liberalism?

• Lesson 2: Before a certain time almost everybody would have held some belief which we now find repugnant. Does this mean we cannot admire or commemorate the people who helped to shape the modern world?

• Lesson 3: Should the John Locke Institute change its name?

• Lesson 4: Is Oxford overrated?

• Lesson 5: What, if anything, do your parents owe you?

• Lesson 6: What is something important, about which nearly everybody is wrong?

• Lesson 7: Have things improved?

• Lesson 8: If you had $10 billion to spend on making the world better, how would you spend it?

• Lesson 9: Just because you’re a millionaire doesn’t mean you should get better healthcare than the rest of us, does it?

• Lesson 10: What should we do to improve the lives of poor people?

Part 2

• Lesson 1: Should we raise the voting age to 25?

• Lesson 2: Is safety more important than fun?

• Lesson 3: Should the law ever prevent people from freely making self-harming decisions? If so, what should and shouldn’t be forbidden – and according to which principles?

• Lesson 4: Who should own your data? The companies with which you agree to share your data, everybody, just you, or nobody?

• Lesson 5: When, if ever, have there been ‘good’ revolutions?

• Lesson 6: Who was the best leader of all time?

• Lesson 7: Should candidates for high office be judged unfit on the basis of something they said or did when they were very young?

• Lesson 8: According to Nobel Laureate, Milton Friedman, ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business…to increase its profits…’
  Do you agree?

• Lesson 9: Is inequality increasing? Does it matter? What, if anything, should we do about it?

• Lesson 10: How socialist is Sweden?

Each lesson contains the following 12 slides:

• A title slide featuring the essay title
• Course and lesson aims + a relevant quote
• Relevant research and content for the essay question, including YouTube videos
• Introduction guidance and a model introduction
• Body paragraph guidance and a model body paragraph
• Conclusion guidance and a model conclusion paragraph
• Overall structure + bibliography guidance with an example
• A 10-question recap quiz (with answers in the speaker notes)
• A 30-word glossary of key terms
• Recommended sources e.g. books, podcasts and websites
• Homework: link to an online vocab quiz + task for the next essay