Transforming Education by Leon Benade & Mark Jackson

Author:Leon Benade & Mark Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

The Classroom as Non-place

Today the walls between the gallery and playground are blurred. The teacher, as twenty-first-century shepherd, changes drastically in this setting. Recently, sheep farmers have experimented with using drones to guide their flock by remote control. This is regarded as a pioneering advance in the ancient arts of shepherding. I am concerned that guiding students to meet OECD-generated standards in a modern learning environment will reduce me to the role of mere facilitator, or drone. David Stow’s vision of the playground as moral panopticon is now transferred into the interior. Snapchat replaces the cherry tree—remember the Ørestad student on the phone?

Furthermore, the MLE transcends criticism. In his book, Morality and Architecture, David Watkin suggests that critics such as Pugin, an advocate of Gothic style in 1836, and Pevsner, an advocate of International Modern style a century later, employ “the same kind of argument to champion the cause of their chosen type: that it is not just a style but a rational way of building evolved inevitably in response to the needs of what society really is or ought to be, and to question its forms is certainly anti-social and probably immoral” (2001, p. 1). The same could be said in relation to the MLE. To question its legitimacy and efficacy appears monstrous. It is as though the teacher who challenges its emergence is one who fears what is rational and good (not to mention what is coming, whether we like it or not). Watkin later asserts that we assume a “familiar historicist, Hegelian belief that each age in history must have its own totally consistent pattern which in turn will be replaced by the pattern of the next age moving forwards in a great plan of development” (2001, p. 114). This development invites the obligatory love of progress that Virilio challenges. Taste and criticism are replaced by preference. School boards can merely choose from the OECD’s catalogue of acceptable school designs as antiseptic symbols of techno-science’s inevitable triumph.

Marc Augé writes: “Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously from the three figures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally finds its full expression in non-places” (2008, p. 88). It would appear the MLE is Supermodern. In a space full of void in which anything can happen, it is very possible that nothing will happen. The MLE can look an awful lot like a waiting room, an airport terminal, or a hotel lobby—all antiseptic and omnipresent circulation spaces in the globalised world. Students will race through an overabundance of skill-based tasks in an overabundance of circulation space the references of which will be entirely individualised. The supermodernity of the MLE is appropriate for a growth-centred, globalised pedagogy. Its concern is not renewal, but accumulation (of skills and self-justification).

Thus the MLE, as non-place has a certain taming effect. Masschelein and Simons (2013) have asserted that today’s student-centred learning environments disorient students and minimise the potential for ‘democratic moments’ in education to arise. Instead they emphasise skills and learning

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