Room to Grow - 'Suburban Nation' examines problems with modern city planning - Critical Essay

Reason, Feb, 2001 by Sam Staley

In Celebration, as in most cities, officials tried to gloss over politically difficult problems: "Hefty doses of boosterism were administered through [the town manager's] monthly newsletters and those sent out by...[the] director of the nonprofit Celebration Foundation," writes Ross. Town meetings were held for "keeping up morale and stoking the flames of volunteerism." After a few months, these had become what most community meetings are: small gatherings of a few key city officials and active residents--hardly the broad-based participatory democracy envisioned by the city's designers.

Nowhere were the conflicts over the community's identity and direction more evident than in the very public, very divisive debate over the community school. Many families were thrown for a loop when they found that The Celebration Company had envisioned a "progressive" school and curriculum.

The school is organized for "multi-age instruction," with grades combined into levels. (Upper 3, for example, includes grades 8 and 9.) The classrooms are called "nurturing neighborhoods," and teachers are "learning leaders." The classrooms are 6,000-square-foot spaces, and all the furniture is movable. "A central 'hearth area,' evocative of the family living room and large enough to congregate all 100-plus students, is furnished with couches, often facing each other like a hotel lobby." Textbooks are rarely used, computer terminals are everywhere, and team teaching is emphasized. Grades are discouraged, along with desks, period bells, daily schedules, report cards, and other "ritual features of traditional education."

The teachers, unsurprisingly, tended to be liberal, if not hard left. One provocative social studies instructor delighted in shaking up her complacent high school-age students by teaching '60s-style social activism, at one point declaring that "of all the rights, the most important is 'the right of the governed to start a revolution."' The students were then assigned four weeks to develop their own "quiet revolution" as part of a "service-learning project."

The school, Ross observes almost matter-of-factly, was the center of conflict in the budding new town. Surprise! Here, Ross' politics get the better of him: Committed to what he considers progressive education, he has little sympathy for those parents who feel otherwise. "From what I could see," he observes critically, "Celebration was a public school besieged by parents' consumer-driven demands for a private school education." The upshot of Ross' analysis is that parents should leave schools to the "professionals"--the teachers and administrators who (he presumes) know what they're doing. As it happens, many of Celebration's parents did approach the school this way--until they found their kids weren't getting the kind or quality of education they wanted.

Ross' ideological perspective drives him to see power relationships as the almost exclusive source of the new town's conflicts. The relationship with Disney does make the Celebration story more interesting, and it certainly provides fodder for Ross' quasi-Marxist interpretations. But this view is incomplete. True, the Disney connection gave the town a few quirks other developments lack--marketing chutzpah, a consumer-friendly reputation, and proximity to one of the nation's premier entertainment complexes. The short time frame for building and the support of a large, well-financed corporation distinguishes it from most modern subdivisions, but not from such contemporary new towns as Sommerlin in Las Vegas, or even such predecessors as Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland. Step back a little, and it becomes obvious that Celebration is going through the growing pains almost any new community experiences.