The Language of Houses by Alison Lurie

Author:Alison Lurie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2014-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Houses of Learning I:

Grade Schools

As the cliché suggests when someone is described as the “product” of a certain school or college, every educational institution, from a toddlers’ playgroup to graduate school, is a kind of factory. The building may resemble a well-landscaped country mansion or a run-down warehouse, but its function is the same. The raw materials (students) enter it and most of the time they are somehow transformed into the type of person conventionally associated with the institution.

In any factory both the employees and the physical plant are necessary to this process. Much has been written about the effect on students of different kinds of teachers and lesson plans, less about the influence of the school building itself. Recently, however, two British experts on school design, Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, have looked at the educational factory structure as an active agent. In their study, titled simply School, they suggest that continually, though silently, a school building tells students who they are and how they should think about the world. It can help to manufacture rote obedience or independent activity; it can create high self-confidence or low self-esteem.

Of course there are wide variations within the educational factory system, visible both in America and in Europe, which is the main focus of Burke and Grosvenor’s book. The lively, friendly, but determined three-year-old is a rather different product from the agreeable but politely ambitious prep school graduate. They may, however, be the same person, and the lessons learned in nursery school may be reinforced (or undermined) years later in a much bigger building. As a graduate student once said to me, describing his middle school: “All the windows were filthy, paint and plaster were scabbing off the walls in the cafeteria, and the playground was full of trash. The place looked like hell, and it made me feel like hell.”

Teachers and staff also receive information from the buildings they work in. Dreary, overcrowded classrooms and cheap, shabby furniture and equipment, especially when combined with low salaries, tell adults as well as children that they are not worth very much. At the other end of the scale, the temporary increase in visible self-satisfaction, sometimes rising to smugness, in someone who has just moved into a large, thickly carpeted, oak-paneled study in an expensive prep school or college is often very striking.

PRESCHOOLS

For small children, the effects of school design may be huge and long-lasting. Any day-care center or nursery school gives toddlers a silent but dramatic message. Good, sturdy outdoor play equipment, bright, comfortable rooms, and lots of interesting toys not only make them happy but also tell them that they deserve the best. The treeless, nearly grassless backyard of the low-cost child-care facility, with its chipped swing set and cracked plastic pool, its stained and broken toys, delivers the opposite message, one that even the kindest and most skillful teacher cannot totally contradict. The building in which such a day-care center is located is also apt to have ill-lit, drab

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