a Education is people engaging in process at a place. Whether the caliber of the faculty or of the student body is of first importance to what is learned is debatable, but everyone agrees that both outrank in importance the places of education. Yet the places and the things of education are not unimportant. Indeed, the late Canadian humorist, Stephen Leacock, raised the physical environment to second rank when he advised that to start a university one should first assemble a student body, then build a smoking room, and if any funds remain, employ a professor. Whatever the order, it was early apparent in our pioneer days that gathering the children around a teacher was cheaper than sending a circuit rider to the homes. And SO the one-room schoolhouse was built. As the Nation grew, the schools also grew-in number, size, complexity, and Dr. Gores is president of Educational Facilities BY HAROLD B. GORES expense. In design, they mirrored the local culture, and were distinguishable from their cultural counterparts - the church and the town hall - only by the presence of the well-scuffed playground and the absence of a steeple. Essentially, this classic trilogy of pioneer community art forms consisted of a single barnlike room, their dimensions determined by the length of native beams. As populations increased in density, schools grew by adding rooms and sorting pupils by age. In 1848, Boston built the first graded elementary school - eight equal size, boxlike classrooms under the same roof, an ingenious arrangement that set the pattern of school design for a hundred years. Not until the mid-1950s was there discontent with the interior layout of space, of rigidly uniform equal size classrooms. Well into the 20th century the Boston boxes of 1848 were still adequate for an education based on stimulusresponse psychology, serving a burgeoning economy that could endlessly absorb the eventual graduates-even the dropouts with no questions asked. Growing like the population and like Topsy, school systems multiplied exponentially. By 1931 there were 127,000 public school districts in this land, each trying to be all things to all children, especially to the more verbal college bound. Predictably, there came a reaction to the mounting proliferation of school districts and small schools. Under the pressure to reduce costs, and the desire to enrich programs in small schools, separate school districts have been "consolidated" by the thousands, reducing the total to approximately 17,000 today, while the size of individual schools has become larger. nce schoolhouses became the biggest public structures in town, and in big towns and cities the most numerous, they became symbols of community aspiration. Until recently, these larger schoolhouses were virtually identical, varying only in their adjustments to differing climate: in the North, a collection of uniform classrooms in linear array, separated by corridors; in the South, taking advantage of a gentler climate, the rows of classrooms were back to back. In exterior appearance the buildings, especially the larger high and preparatory schools, were replicas of whatever architectural style - Greek, Roman, Gothic, Federal was most likely to proclaim that the institution was the keeper of knowledge, morality, the cultural heritage, and all that was good. This early yearning for architectural monumentality is not to be denigrated. What better public expression of the community's pride and intent than a near permanent (with good maintenance. practically eternal) statement for all to see. Plato said, "That which is honored in a country will prosper there." In their monumentality the buildings sought to honor education, but alas, they were expensive. Even less than the schoolhouse has the classroom varied from the norm. Debates raged in education at least since Boston's Quincy School, but the classroom itself remained as it was, a place where one teacher and one class gathered in one room to engage in confrontal teaching. As long as education took the form of "schooling" and its purpose was primarily to transmit the common culture to the young, the schoolhouse, its layout, and its equipment could be straightforward and utilitarian. (To quote an architect much honored and employed in a Northern State, "The people up here know what a schoolhouse is and I give it to them. I tell the school board what it will cost a square foot and everybody knows what money is and what a square foot is." Incidentally, this practical man produced many schools quite worthy of their times. But dreamer, he.) no From the mid-19th century to mid-20th. schoolhouses were locked in their own Cartesian grids of standard classrooms, each accommodating a standard number of children to be instructed by one teacher of, it is hoped, standard credentials. The teacher's mission was to transmit the predominant culture for a year. In a secondary school, bells would ring at regular intervals, signaling students, and sometimes teachers, to change boxes. Since the process of schooling consisted mostly of a talking teacher and a learner who rarely stirred from his place, the learner was provided with a "pupil-station" consisting of a chair and desk fixed to the floor. Not until well into the 20th century were the chair and desk freestanding and rearrangeable. Reflecting the Nation's industrialization the furniture itself was industrialized. It consisted, like the Model T, of inter changeable machined parts, the better to be manufactured on the assembly line with no departure from its school-brown uni formity. The basic tools of instructional equipment were book and blackboard. Tο be sure, early in the 20th century the moving picture arrived (but never did "replace the American teacher," as Mr. Edison had predicted), and then radio with the high promise of connecting every crossroad school with the dialog of the spheres; and later television, heralded as "the new window in the classroom"; and more recently, teaching machines and electronic devices, rising in sophistication to computer-assisted instruction. Even today, these devices of instructional technology are struggling for general acceptance under the handicap of earlier over-promise. For a hundred years these schools served well the relatively simple society, their designs reflecting two underlying assumptions: The first was that schools were only for the young-that young people were to be assembled in groups sorted by age; that transmission of the dominant subculture was its principal function; that the transmission, called teaching, would result from showing and telling by an older person located at the "front" of the group. This frontal (or confrontal) teaching in its own private classroom box, sealed off from its environment by floor-to-ceiling maximum security partitions, had many virtues for a Nation growing at a faster pace than that with which it was training its teachers. Not the least of its virtues was that it saved money: Relatively untrained and inexperienced teachers, given a book, could conduct lessons and maintain order in the group either by the natural interest of what was being talked about, or by force of personality - by charm or by fright. If the children were still inattentive or unruly, the more affluent districts reduced class size, often substituting intimacy of setting for vitality; while the poorer districts overloaded their classes to the point that children were but listening audiences. The second assumption was that schools were islands in our culture, that they not only could but should stand aside from the affairs of the town, from the conditions that vexed all the people. It was as though schools could remain secure even as the neighboring tide ran out economically and socially, that children could be secure whether or not their parents were. In simpler days this was mostly true. An economy growing exponentially somehow found places for most of the burgeoning population. Youth was secure when everyone was secure, and schools were at liberty-indeed, set apart-to conduct their own affairs, raise their own money, and prepare the young for productive and fulfilling adulthood. The arrangement worked satisfactorily for the most part until well into the 1950s. As the society grew more affluent, so did the schools. By mid-century, the American schoolhouse was no longer "a ragged beggar sunning." More likely, it was a big beautiful edifice, proclaiming to all that education was a gigantic enterprise of monumental priority in our culture. But there were stirrings under the surface. As long ago as John Dewey and the progressive education movement, the elementary schools had loosened up, though not to the extent of exploding the walls that separated group from group. Schools were still egg-crates, and the American high school especially was still a collection of isolated rooms under one roof. There were other stirrings, too, notably in the student body and in the public expectation of what schools should do. As students in increasing numbers voiced their disenchantment with being processed by groups, as the frustrations of teachers mounted when they lost the attention of their students, even as the public came to blame the schools for America's failure to be the first in space, the pressures combined to produce dramatic rearrangement of the whole process of schooling, and in the larger sense, education. This riptide of strong and conflicting waves of pressure, gathering strength since the decade of the 1950s, is reshaping the role of teachers and how they teach, the curriculum and what is to be learned, and the habitat-the physical setting-in which the act takes place. Being closer to the electorate (and generally better supported), the first schools to respond to the new needs and new demands were the suburban schools. There the schools, together with their Of all kinds, styles, sizes and prices. Address THE GEM PENCIL SHARPENER Sharpens both Lead and Slate Pencils. "It gives me great pleasure to recommend the 'Gem Pencil Sharpener.' It does the work well and quickly. This last is of great importance for school work. This Sharpener' is in satisfactory use in very many of the cities and towns of the State. From what I personally know of the results here and elsewhere, I am fully convinced that the 'Gem' is the very best sharpener on the market. In fact I do not believe that there is any other which at all compares with this one for use elther in the school or the office." JOEL D. MILLER, Member of Mass. State Board of Education. Send for Descriptive Circular. PRICE: $3.50. |