Blogg-Ed Indetermination

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

-Malvina Reynolds

This cheesy little tune from 1962 (don’t sing it, it will get stuck in your head!) is nonetheless a spot-on description of much of American suburbia and schools. Does anyone doubt that you could be blindfolded, whisked away to some undisclosed location, and upon being unmasked immediately determine if you were in a school building? It would matter little if the building was in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world, in 2009 or 1909. School architecture is universal and universally bad, and therein lies a problem.

As I have discussed in previous posts, our current school system is based on large part on a post-agrarian, industrial model in which efficiency was prized and individualism was perceived as an impediment to the smooth operation of the school. Thus it was natural to put students in neat rows, with the teacher front and center, dispensing wisdom, discipline, and moral judgment. It was natural as well to bolt the chairs to the floor (why would they need to be moved?), make classrooms dark and work-like to discourage frivolity, design libraries as inner sanctums of reverence and quietude, cafeterias as assembly lines of nutrition, and gymnasiums as places of drilled calisthenics and competition.

Since that time there have been cosmetic changes–a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic–but the mother ship itself is still steaming its way towards disaster.

Where to look for inspiration?

Why not look to places where children and teens naturally like to hang out? Say shopping malls, or movie theaters, or living rooms, or parks? Spend sometime like an ethnographer and really watch how kids interact with one another, how they sit, congregate, form and dissolve ad hoc groups and you will begin to see how spaces can be made more adaptable, organic, open, inviting, and alive. Watch how they interact with furniture, what goes where and what they are doing with it. If your school is in the process of building or remodeling and you don’t have student voices in the design you might as well take the picture above and use it as your blueprint.

Fitting 21st century learning and teaching into 19th century architecture based on assumptions about children and teaching makes about as much sense as using a horse and buggy to fly to the moon. Oh wait, we last went to the moon in the 20th century. Well, you get my drift…

In a previous post, I wrote about the agrarian school year, and how it serves as an artificial constraint to school innovation in general, and time for professional development, curriculum writing, and project-based learning in particular. But the school year is just one of several constraints that should be examined – and I suspect eliminated entirely – if schools are going to truly become 21st century learning and teaching institutions. Here are eight other constraints that need to be examined.

1. Academic departments.
2. Grading and assessment systems.
3. Grade levels.
4. AP courses.
5. Teacher-proof curricula.
6. One-size-fits-all school models.
7. Teacher education programs, teacher licensure departments, and teacher unions.
8. Current school architectural models.
9. Textbooks and textbook publishers.

Over the next few weeks I will write more about each of these items and my take on how each of them constrains the true innovation required to become a 21st century school. I hope that you will engage in the discussion.