This pitch comes from the Molly Ones, and from me too.
Molly Group One (MG-1) is made up of five people in their 20s with whom I meet every other week. Occasionally I offer them a suggestion or two, but mostly they work to make me infinitesimally less square. (Note from ones: use of “square” not at all cool.)
This past weekend we commiserated about the trend in educational architecture toward stark classrooms and interchangeable furniture. The young professor of our group teaches at Stanford, where, obviously, he is privy to the best of the best. Nevertheless, he gets to his classroom forty minutes early to put up posters, layout paper and pens, and do whatever he can to give the space a sense of spirit and play. Otherwise, as he sees it, it is too sterile for design, innovation, and creativity.
Another member of MG-1, also at Stanford but as a grad student, is enrolled in one of the world’s most prestigious teacher training programs. The top-notch screens that surround her classrooms mean she never knows where she will have to look. It is hard to focus and orient, just the opposite of how, according to the research her professors assign her, a student should feel.
The classroom building I teach in at ALA in Johannesburg is excellent by any standards. It would not be out of place at Stanford. There is a projector I can use at a moment’s notice and gleaming glass whiteboards. It is wonderfully maintained. And there, everyday, for these ten weeks, I will be meeting with the most compelling students I know.
But because all the tables are on wheels, people lock them in place so they do not roll around during class. In one of those failures of good intention, moving them is actually more of a pain than if they were the kind of wood table I sat at forty years ago. As a result, all the classrooms end up in the same old-fashioned horseshoe shape, teacher at the center.
As I prefer a seminar table, I do move the tables with the kids each day into the position we enjoy, but we just lift the tables, never roll them, and the whole thing takes a few moments, as does moving them back for the next teacher. The inefficiency of efficiency, as it were.
Much more to the point, however, is the septic-ness of these spaces. At the start of the day, as at the end, all the classrooms are perfectly clean. My classroom is ready to go when a fellow teacher walks out and I walk in. I need only connect to the network to show slides. I can write something on the board to get going.
Except that all the wonderfully clean and gleam and silicon—all meaning to say, “here is space anyone can do anything,” also announce something else: “Here nothing grows, nothing sticks.”
This space? It is home to no one.
I do not remember most or perhaps any of what I learned from Miss Schwingel in eleventh grade. It was a long time ago and I was a sieve brained seventeen year old. But surrounded by books and with quotes from authors she loved pinned to the walls, she did the heroic work of claiming reading mattered and, by extension, that a life of commitment was a thing. Not even the least literate kid in her room could have missed the lesson that school and grades and homework were not solely tickets to advancement, they were also portals to thought and spirit and finding one’s place in what Mary Oliver calls the family of things.
Another member of Molly Group One spoke of how she liked the cubby-sized spaces and odd furniture of a teacher she loved, a space to feel safe rather than processed. Students often find sanctuary in labs and theaters, music rooms, and even administrators’ offices. Kids need a home at school, as do teachers. But so do ideas. And while “The Named Architect Center for Learning” may well impress the board, students need texture and to know they can spill paint, splatter thoughts, and plant seeds to see if they grow. How do our classroom spaces encourage that?
I could go on indefinitely about this topic. I am, for instance, of the belief schools need to line every wall they can with books. Yes, I know the material is available elsewhere, on a device. And yes, I know all those books must be sorted and cared for. But some inventions cannot be bettered and however great it is to read fifty novels on a Kindle, books convey, brick by brick, a deep message even to those who never pick them up: A person made this.
You are a person. What will you make? How will it grow? Who will it sustain?
I fear that the gleam and clean is the trend not only out of the best intentions, and not only because we have strapped ourselves to the rocket ship of technology without considering its destination, but also out of old-fashioned insecurity which comes to this: How will it look?
How will it look to parents if the walls are covered in the art that students make?
How will it look to the Deans if kids are running around rather than sitting still?
How will it look, most of all, to donors, if our buildings do not shine?
It might look, I think, as if we cared to go backward. Not backward to Dickens, but as if we recognized that on a small and shrinking planet, a global village in which tribalism will finally do us in or be the source of our salvation, we could follow the roots back to those sustainable practices our ancestors had no choice but to live by, where the lessons and rhythms of plant and tree and bush advanced a common garden, not a gated bubble. A place where every kid can see, despite the weeds, that what grows here might grow forever.
Thank you for this one, Ted. It's beautifully written and pulls up a lot of memories of the comfort, wonder, and security provided by my teachers throughout the years.