culture

Places where you learn
by Colin Ward

In the conference held in November 1987 the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Colin Ward sets out the basic concept of their "educational". Strictly libertarian. In fact, quite anarchic.

 

All are good places to learn. From childhood, children learn from their surroundings by observing their parents and neighbors, study them as they start work and copy them. But since the work has moved from inside the house to the factory, unaware of the home learning has been replaced by the teaching intentional in particular places called schools. The manual skills, handling of materials, as the art of the potter, the carpenter, the farmer or the cook, were considered as distinct from those intellectuals, such as reading and calculation. In Western societies, schools have historically existed only as places where a small minority of students was taught by priests and scribes to learn the mysteries of religion and of written texts. The idea that anyone should be given the opportunity to learn anything that belongs to the modern world. Only a little more than a century, schools have been transformed from simple to complex institutions classrooms. Similarly, higher education has evolved, from the dialogues of Socrates and his students at the University of Athens in a square full of modern specialist space, classrooms for conferences and workshops. This article deals with physical environmental education. Tell us what these places?

Learning at preschool

We were all children, even if we have forgotten, our parents always remember the day when for the first time we crawl across a room, one in which we walked alone, our exploration of gardens, woods, fields, the first time we saw the sea. But the children themselves often better to remember small details and physical sensations: the cold of a metal, the mystery of the glass, the sensation from which we climb the stairs and go down hard, the fabric of wool or silk, the hair of an animal.
The child's world expands toward the street, with shops and services, new sights, new sounds and smells. In town, in a suburb or a village, is vivid experience of the senses, a learning situation. Children, of course, the more they are smaller, the more they look close to the ground and this is one reason why they are much more significant for the surface and the division of floors and pavements, as the level changes and the steps (enough low for an adult to easily overcome, because a small but high enough to sit on it). When urban geographers in the United States ask adults what they remember of their early childhood, especially those mentioning the soil environments who attended, the tactile characteristics over visual ones.
Soon the child begins to eagerly observe objects in the street, gives its name to the vehicle, note the garbage truck, ambulance, fire engine the vehicle, it indicates the letters of the insignia of the streets, shops and department stores , asks the meaning relentlessly, eager to learn.
In this phase, the lucky child already attends a nursery or play group, interacts with others and with a new environment. Today this is for many their first chance to test materials for building: brick, wood, water and sand. Not many of these groups are based in purpose built buildings. Several are often managed by their own parents, in private homes, church halls or classrooms more. In addition to tables and chairs, solid and proper measures, the essential elements are the same things and space to use them, which includes an outdoor area for digging, and use bicycles, tricycles and toys to be dragged with string.
Learning took place in a natural and inevitable in society easier when the child was (and in many areas of the world still is) part of the family as economic unit. In modern societies, and sophisticated learning opportunities must be provided for the purpose. Research conducted in Britain and the United States show that the benefits of early learning can still be seen in many years away.
But the environment never ceases to be a place where you learn just because a certain age, children are forced to spend a certain amount of time locked up in school. Many hours of the day, however, did not go to school.
In the early years, most children can not wait to go to school, albeit with some anxiety, but newly arrived adolescents in Western countries, young people can not wait to get out, want to express their own Culture of the road. " In poor countries, where the road is the school from an early age, children enjoy the right school. But for them is short-dream the opportunities that the rich world takes for granted.

The early school

In the centuries in which the schools were places where the boys were prepared to become clerics or ecclesiastical, educational space was simple. A classical education in need of books and writing materials, a teacher and a classroom. Nothing more. This could be taken in a private home, a church, in any available space. When there was a specially built to school, was bare and humble. There were no concessions to the child character and even the convenience of students. The image we have in mind is of old buildings with dusty rows of benches on which generations of boys have had their initial study of a monotonous and repetitive, with severe punishments. The impression is as old as the school itself. Shakespeare wrote: "The whining schoolboy with his satchel and the radiant face of the morning, advancing like a snail recalcitrant to school," and the poet William Wordsworth lamented in some famous verses "the shadows of the prison-house [that] begin to close on the boy who becomes great. "
Two centuries ago a small band of pioneers gave way to a slow revolution in education, which laid the foundations of what today we would call a school that has the child at the center. The best known of these pioneers are Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852). An infinite number of educational experiments in Europe and America can be traced back to ideas that they put into motion. Their revolution took different forms.
The first refers to the idea that the school dovsse be open to girls and not just for kids. Before this principle were accepted, the rich kids and poor leaders had learned from her mother or alone.
The second idea was that every child has the right to education, although parents could not afford to do without his job or his wages. The third idea, the previous result was that school education should be free, compulsory and universal. The fourth was the view of education from early childhood. The fifth alleged that the school should not be limited to teach reading, writing, numeracy and pray, but had to include the sciences, arts and manual skills.
All these ideas had been put to the test long before, in different places. Individual teachers in European cities or in small schools of the towns of New England had tried everything to extend education. This tells us that the teacher is more important than the classroom, certainly the most important institution. Try to think back to when she went to school and that particular teacher who has had a real influence on you.
None of those pioneers considered it necessary to provide guidance on the structure of the school. Emilia, Rousseau's book that tackles the issues of education, the boy's title has a direct and single with his mentor, the freedom of a country house among fields and woods. The school is a complete Emilio rural environment. Pestalozzi read the book of Rousseau, he quit his job and devoted himself to agriculture. He founded a school for poor boys, with the intention of making them work in the fields during the summer months, to engage in spinning and weaving during the winter months, and let them learn the basics when it did not work. Inspired by Pestalozzi and Froebel created his own school in a farmhouse. Following is interested in pre-school education and in 1840 opened a kindergarten.
All theories about the game and its role in the formation back to him. Developed a series of "gifts, occupations, games and singing" we deem appropriate to different stages of growth. The first "gift" was a ball of wool, to give the youngest of three months. The following gifts were a sphere, a cube and a cylinder of wood, then a series of subdivisions of the cube. This is followed by rings and wooden sticks. The most famous American architect of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright, had been brought up with these "gifts" from her mother, a student of Froebel. Architectural historians have found their influence in his early projects.

Vase, clay or flower?

The idea of a school that puts children at the heart and encourages him to explore his world and to experience the physical environment was the most important that has gradually changed our conceptions of education. If we look below the theoretical language, we discover that there are three attitudes about childhood:

• The child is an empty vessel to fill. This is the traditional view: there are a number of concepts and skills of language and calculations that must be paid in the vessel. The materials are called and the curriculum in the twentieth century has grown to encompass an increasingly wide range of concepts. When a new issue of public interest, for example on road safety, sexual health and computer literacy, it is up to schools to the vessel. The theory of the vessel implies that children are lined up to receive knowledge. This is the traditional structure of the classroom.

• The child is a block of clay that a skilled potter, the teacher should model. The company wants good citizens, so the child must be trained to become one. Religion wants faithful, then the child should be trained in the religion. Employers need workers, then the child should be covered in a reliable way of working. This model implies that the classroom is intentionally isolated from outside influences that may hinder the work of the potter.

• The child is a flower that is lovingly cultivated, giving him the right conditions for growth, allowing it to develop according to its own procedures. It is the approach that puts the child at the center and implies that the school environment is designed according to your needs. There must be mobile to its size, a choice of warm colors, small groups of tables and benches in a row. The teacher must help and encourage them not to be an instructor who frightening.

Our problem is that we tend to hold together all three of these attitudes. We want the child to be pot, clay flower, all together, and when it fails to meet these expectations, we went after him with the school or with ourselves. Usually, with the school.
Ideas about the school structure are continuously changed in the last century. An elderly person who attends a concert or a play in a modern school always observed that "schools were not so when I was young," recalls the high railings around the school yard, note the signs that read: "The Parents should not exceed this. " Remember that the window sill was high, to prevent children from looking out and notes that today is low enough to allow it. Remember the rows of desks or tables, all facing the teacher, and sees that kids today often work in small groups around a single table with the teacher that passes between one another. If you have studied in the country, in a school Monocle, attended by children of different ages, is surprised by the number of specialized classrooms of a modern school for the teaching of artistic, technical, scientific and language. The architects who design schools like to think that school is an educational workshop. A number of unfortunate children consider it a prison.
The elderly are particularly surprised by the size and scope that has taken on secondary education today. Often this is a surprise for young people. The manager of a school in the country asked, "Can you imagine what it means for a child that comes from my school, with thirty students, go to a school, miles away, with 2,750 members?"
The size of a school is a hotly debated issue of school policy. Parents prefer small schools, for primary education as secondary. Consider the most intimate and friendly small school, an institution with which they and their children can relate. The authorities prefer large schools, preference is explained that with the economies of scale apply in other areas as well as the possibility of putting together a larger number of experts on the subject. The small size is considered an advantage in the private sector of education and an anachronism in the public sector. It's only publicly funded schools that are closed due to their small size.
It is not easy to conduct research on the relationship between size and performance of schools, partly because we all agree on what we expect from a school, partly because of differences of class and family background of students. One of the most significant research on this subject was conducted in the United States, Canada and replicated on a smaller scale, in the English region of Cheshire. The research found that "the greatest school students were exposed to a greater number of school activities and the best of them reached the standard in many activities for which students from smaller schools did not arrive at an acceptable level of contrast, students in smaller schools participate in more activities - curricular, interscolastiche, cultural and extra-curricular, and their versatility and the scores achieved were steadily higher, said they were more satisfied and better and showed the strongest motivations in all fields of education " .
This accurate summary of the findings of the research is more precise answer we can give today to questions about the effects on children of school buildings, with regard to size. But there are other aspects to the study sites. In nurseries and kindergartens taken for granted that the atmosphere should be as close as possible to domestic violence, but at the same time it must be a laboratory where children can explore the world around them. After more than ten years, the school becomes a laboratory for formal study. It is for teachers who need an environment conducive to the effective performance of their abilities.

Venice International Anarchist Meeting - 1984. Colin Ward.

The almighty wall

The school is the daily environment of children for a few years, but will leave lasting traces all his life. It is also the working environment for all life for teachers. Much more than a century ago a famous Victorian headmaster, Edward Thring Uppingham puzzling observation made in this regard:

Though you might say or think, the Wall Almighty is, after all, the supreme and final arbiter of the schools. I want to say that no living force in the world is able to overcome the pressure inert, devoid of feelings and eternal of fixed structures, the fixed conditions in which you should do the job. Do not stop until you've fixed all the machinery for the job, the best possible. The waste of the teacher in the workshop are the lives of men.

Thring was unaware of the fact that in his time, like ours, the majority of teachers were women. But to emphasize a point ignored forever. The majority of people at work, even in an office full of computers at the factory or at a station with a computerized assembly line, tends instinctively to customize your workspace. The railroad men have their own shelters next to the railroad, truck drivers decorate their cockpit. Even the teachers like to leave a mark on the surrounding environment, at least trial pack cabinet of books important to them and to have at hand the material they use.
In any system providing for compulsory education, the teacher has the responsibility of the class both professionally and legally. The "wall Almighty" is the classroom which is to serve the needs of that group of students and of that particular teacher during the lesson. Schools and universities in different countries and with students of different age groups working in various ways. The architects have for years debated the various merits of a school building horizontal (long corridors) and vertical (many stairs), a question that is often resolved by the space available for them. The curricula discussed in a similar way to a horizontal organization structure (referred to one age group) or vertical (with respect to the knowledge of a given subject).
But the first thing you notice those coming from outside the movement around the building or the school complex. The schools and colleges in different countries and different age groups operate in different ways. In some cases, students who go to various local teachers, other teachers are moving in the classroom with their classroom material. In some cases the same classrooms (labs, art classrooms, gyms) are equipped with equipment for the specific activity of a subject.
Other teachers have simply a set of knowledge and love to impart knowledge about their particular subject. The teaching materials take him all in his head. Instead, language teachers, for example, like to decorate the classroom with posters, prints and objects that evoke the culture of a country, just to point out to their students that the particular people speak their language in a real context and worth knowing. Teachers are often more satisfied than those of art and practical applications that have the lab full of objects that provide a justification for the skills that are trying to convey. Often their students are happier. But are the least sympathetic to the caretaker and the caretaker, because they are so much more confusion and dirt. But they are the ones who have the Wall Almighty on their side.

Open project

In the sixties and seventies there was a tendency to break down the walls. As we have seen expand spaces "open office", we have witnessed the birth of elementary schools to open floor plan. The arguments are always the same. The corridors are a waste of space, only serve to move. Remove them, we will have a traffic free environment for all. Thus at the factory, why not everywhere? It also costs less to build.
In offices it was possible for two factors: the universal carpet and the fact that modern office machines are very noisy. Why not apply the same method to the schools? The goddess is to give every teacher and every course a "home base" separated only by movable shelves and a series of "business lines" through which students move from one class to another.
Does it work? Students and teachers appreciate it? These are questions that have had different responses by different researchers. Perhaps, just as for offices, depends on the psychology of individuals. Perhaps it is an extrovert who appreciates the continual interaction with others and those who are introverted and prefer to feel the need for a safe and secure nest.
A group of British researchers who studied the plan to open kindergartens for children between five and seven years found that teachers would spend less time talking with kids and more in the routine management of the school. They also observed that children spend less time in the open to talk to each other, are more attentive to what the teacher says, and are more interested in the activities and what are the other boys and girls. The open floor plan does not produce differences in the acquisition of basic skills.
Another study in England found that only one third of teachers working in schools to really appreciate the open floor plan, which is more stressful work and that "one quarter of the day for kindergarten may be committed to open space to do the call, move from one activity to another, reorder, change to the hours of physical education or just waiting. " Both studies noted the existence of good open floor plans and other poor in primary schools, and the difference depends on the extent to which the general work area is controlled by the "home base".
It is a natural reaction for teachers who are paid to control what happens at school, but are not consulted in the design stage.

Debenham (England) - Francesco Codello in the middle of Colin Ward and his wife Harriet, in their home.

Rejecting the school

The most important fact about the places to study in Britain as in the U.S., is that despite the expectations of parents, local communities and public authorities who provide them, many children reject them. Many years ago, the British Ministry of Education and Science commissioned a report on education to young normal between 13 and 16 years. Sir John Newsom, who wrote the report in 1963 titled Half Our Future, introduced him to this story:

A boy who had just left his former school headmaster asked him what he thought of the new buildings. "It could be all of marble, sir," replied the young man, "but it would always be a school of shit."

Nothing that has happened in the following quarter century in the field of education has changed the perception of the situation by any responsible educator.
The schools are different from each other except a human environment. You're in there because you're forced to. That's because schools are compared to prisons. This is a tremendous paradox. In wealthy countries there is always a certain percentage of young people who refuse school, escapes whenever he can and does its best to hinder the work and destroy the structures. The school vandalism, fires and the continuous theft of valuable furnishings are an unpleasant and costly problem for the school authorities. As this related to their prestige and their efficiency, they tend to hide it is to themselves and to citizenship.
In poor countries, suffering from an acute shortage of buildings, books and facilities, such as money to pay for teachers, education is seen as a valuable asset to be pursued at all costs.
When Kenya was fighting for independence from British rule in the fifties, there was a period called the "Mau-Mau Emergency," during which the British army inside a large number of adults and children, as "suspicious" , turning in fields surrounded by barbed wire. An army captain has to lead one of these fields, full of teenagers, and had to be guided by the experience of the English school system to think about how to keep them occupied. So houses and organized them in classes according to age and instructed his men and older boys to teach them reading, writing and arithmetic. The embarrassing thing for him was that the solution worked. Across the barbed wire formed a crowd of parents and children who asked them to also enjoy the wonderful privilege. He turned his prison into a school.
In rich countries the tendency is to turn schools into prisons. We design buildings "vandal-proof", with no windows and no furniture and surfaces that can destroy, reversing the trend of the previous century. The hallways are guarded by policemen. Useless. Who wants it still manages to wreak havoc on the school and discovered even more ingenious methods to stay away. Absences are a variety of explanations. Hatred can be a subject, the dislike of a teacher or the need for the building itself. Or the need to make some money in the usual ways: trade for street begging, prostitution, drug dealing. Or, you have to look after younger brother, while the single mother is out working. Finally, in an era of great migration, may be the need to act as an interpreter for immigrant parents to talk with public officials or social welfare organizations.
In the search for solutions beyond those of a punitive increased vigilance and put in prison, an even greater number of young people, have made attempts to create alternatives to the school. Some dedicated teachers have turned against truancy centers in places of study for young people who refuse school. The experiences that have worked really have different characteristics. The first is found in small, that does not resemble a school. This can be a circle in a private house or a store without homes. The second is that having been done at the center of the needs of an individual student and not a school subject to be transmitted. The third is dependent on a direct and personal relationship between teacher and student. Featuring some of the oldest and simplest situation of a cultured person who transmits his knowledge to young people. Just as in the field in Kenya years ago, there are young people in mainstream schools who envy the treatment of those who have broken the rules. Which suggests that learning depends on the relations and structures.

The progressive answer

In the two decades between the two world wars a number of schools "progressive" in several countries tried experimenting with changing the orientation of education, often rediscovering the principles of the early pioneers. Examples of the kind well known in England were the Malting House School in Cambridge, directed by Susan Isaac, the Beacon Hill School, directed by Dora Russell and Summerhill School by AS operated for half a century Neill, whose writings on the educational methods adopted are read worldwide. None of these experiences designed buildings used as schools. Did not have enough money and they used whatever they could afford to rent space. Dartington Hall, another progressive school English, was quite rich and could be designed from the beginning. The structures were similar to those of a normal school, but with a beautiful countryside all around. It was a boarding school, and the expectation that more was left impressed with the alumni was the fact of having a single room.
Rudolf Steiner in Germany and Switzerland had developed a philosophy called Anthroposophy, giving way to the Waldorf school movement, which then spread all over the world. Steiner had elaborated his ideas on the environment of study and when his first school was destroyed by a fire redesigned concrete because he thought that the curvilinear structures made possible by that material were adapted to the needs of children. Inspired by the theories of Goethe, developed some views on the function of color spaces for students and the work carried out by them in school.
Many progressive educators have influenced the conduct of primary, but in no way influenced the design of the study sites.

Community of scholars

Higher education has followed a path similar to that of primary school. In the universities of the Middle Ages, groups of students gathered around particular teachers to learn what they had to offer, and then moved to another place of study. Oxford was born from a group of rebellious students of Paris, Cambridge, directed from Oxford, Harvard in Cambridge with controversy and so on.
When you formed a tradition of study in one place, the university received donations from patrons. It is not easy to find in modern centers of research and study the traces of those humble origins and a bit 'random but today the prestige of the university is directly proportional to age and the inconvenience of its structures. In the English and Cambridge Massachusetts you can meet eminent scientists in their departments and brand new and expensively equipped laboratories, recalling with nostalgia the former warehouses and stores where they had made important discoveries that were made famous their institutions, and you can hear them say things like this: "In those days we were a community of scholars, not a diploma factory."

Schools without walls

Lev Tolstoy in the nineteenth century had decided to establish a school in their village and we visited schools in Germany, France and England, leading to this conclusion: "Education is an attempt to control what is natural in the culture: it is culture under duress. "
In Marseilles was in every school and spoke with students and parents. He found the terrible school buildings: such as prisons, where children rote learning only what was written in their books, without being able to read, repeat, or add anything more.

With the insight of the great writer arrived at this important conclusion:

If by some miracle you were to see all these institutions without having seen the people on the street, in shops, cafes, close to their homes, that review would be a nation that has been educated in this way? Without a doubt would come to the conclusion that the nation is ignorant, rude, hypocritical, full of prejudice and almost senseless. But just walk into any relationship with a man, a word with him, convinced that the French nation is actually not very different from what you think: smart, bright, friendly, free from bias and very civil.

How could it be? Tolstoy found the answer after school, wandering the city itself, in cafes, museums, the port, the stalls of books. He discovered that the real education came from the environment.
After a century, a series of Western educators rearranged the same discovery. Deschoolers were called, and among them are mentioned Ivan Illich in Mexico, John Holt, Paul Goodman and Everett Reimer in the United States, which organized alternative schools in empty shops used to study space, or building "learning networks" with people trying to learn specific skills from those who put them into practice. They are the ones who invented the "school without walls", using the city as a tool for teaching. In the sixties in Philadelphia, the Parkway Education Program planted a home with an office for teachers and lockers for students who departed from there to study art in the museums, zoo biology, engineering and economics in a garage, from 14 to 18 years, offices and newspapers. For those enrolled in the Chicago Metro High School reached by bus and underground places of the city where they could learn something. In Montreal, Metro Education used the subway lines to provide quick access to various facilities utilized in the city center: closed cinemas, offices empty, unused computer centers, parks, restaurants, libraries, clinics and laboratories.
All resources were already available for study. Of course, these activities contradicted a century of specialization of the school structure, required a great effort of organization and management, well beyond the normal duties of a teacher. The management structures of schools with huge budgets and spending with equally high expectations of parents, could not accept experiments deschooling.

Community Education

We can, as parents and as citizens, to find some compromise between the radical ideas of deschooling and expectations we have for the education of our children? Several educators have considered the school as just one of many resources for study and fun for the whole community. The trend of the schools grow and acquire expensive equipment highlights the absurdity of love her keep as a separate and segregated ghettos, with expensive equipment and resources, available to only a certain age and only for certain hours of the day, certain days of the week and some months of the year.
This view is shared by the experts who call for vandalism in practice that the schools remain open for as long as possible after the class schedules, to ensure that there is always people inside and in the hope that young people see them as things themselves and not as targets to attack and destroy.
Which brings us to a different conception of the school. No longer an isolated building, surrounded by playing fields and fences. Instead, a structure for the community, located between the shops and government buildings in the center of a neighborhood. It does not have an assembly hall, but you need when you need a room used for any purpose by the public. There is a dining hall: Students go to the bars open to the public and act accordingly. There is a gym: The school uses the sports halls are open to all. There is a school library: the public library has a collection of books far more extensive. Classrooms and laboratories are scattered among the shops and offices in the center and are also used by other organizations. The daily life of the community and young people are inextricably mixed, as were the majority for centuries.
Needless to say, the traditional distinctions between different levels of education are equally nuanced: nursery, kindergarten and elementary, middle and bottom, universities and continuing education are, in terms of plant material, commonly used in the same environment.
It takes an enormous effort to put a school in this way in the social fabric of a community. A successful, despite a gloomy view of public spending, is dell'Abraham Moss Centre in Manchester.

The difficulty does not concern the design. The message we want to give this article is this: you can teach and learn in any environment. The problem arises due to structures divided into watertight compartments and different levels of earnings of the various government agencies involved individuals.
But the method that starts from the concept that the school is a special place, but only one of many facilities that use any public area, is finding supporters in several countries. It is a method that improves the attitude of young people in the community and the community to young people. Indicates how will education in the twenty-first century.