Education and architecture - Comment - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, May, 2002 by Peter Davey

Architecture has a crucial role in the educational system because it provides the spaces in which we grow up and learn about society. But what sort of buildings are needed for the age of electronic information, which is transforming all our relationships?

Everyone is agreed that education at all levels is under great pressure, frequently in crisis. In the developing world, the majority of the population is often illiterate; women particularly find it hard to be educated. In many richer nations, education systems are plainly failing to cope with the needs of sizeable sectors of the population, generating a self-perpetuating and ever increasing underclass, often virtually illiterate, and largely unsocialized. (1) At the other end of the scale, good universities in many countries are only accessible by the rich: another self-perpetuating class is establishing itself.

Obviously, architecture and planning can only have a very limited impact on such problems: they are largely the province of politicians and the educational system. But is clear that building designers can have some effect. Think for instance of the Arup school in Ladakh (p52), or the institute which teaches chicken farming in Guinea by Heikkinen & Komonen (AR November 2001, p58). In their very different ways, the two show how architectural imagination, coupled with understanding of local society and its indigenous building techniques (with the judicious introduction of modern technology) can clearly begin to make a radical difference that shows hope of transforming the whole of society for the better.

Industrialization of education

Western societies were transformed when, for instance, the Prussians and the British invested heavily in providing basic education for the poor with systems in which new buildings were as important as creation of a new teaching profession. (2) Peter Hall has remarked that the results 'could be achieved at modest cost, through industrialized rote learning at the hands of very modestly qualified young teachers ... the methods were those of the factory, the standards were low but adequate to their needs'. (3)

Half a century later, the nations of Western Europe (and, curiously, California) used industrialization in another way - to manufacture schools in some of the most ambitious postwar building programmes. The results (apart from one or two well-publicized building system failures) were startlingly effective - at least for a generation. (4) They broke the rigid hierarchies and factory-like methods of the late Victorian schools, they offered flexibility, contact with nature, light and the wider environment (unlike their predecessors, which were almost inevitably surrounded by high blank walls).

In the late '30s, Lewis Mumford had a vision of what the school of the future should be 'From the drill school to the organic school from closed issues and mechanical indoctrination to open inquiry and co-operative discipline as a normal process of living ... one of steps. From the part-time school confined to a building, to the full-time school taking stock of and taking part in the whole life of the neighborhood, the city, the region'. (5)

Electronic Athens?

Compare this to the much less idealistic, but worldly-wise and technologically experienced picture that Hall paints of the contemporary city and the role of education within it. He suggests that perhaps we are replicating the problems that Engels observed in Victorian Manchester, where the bourgeoisie travelled 'back to their suburban villas along the well lit thoroughfares lined with shops, never noticing the proletarian misery behind them'. (6) Hall argues that technology is perhaps 'the definitive challenge - in the achievement of the urban order for the informational age. By allowing children and young adults to engage in self-paced learning, carefully adapted to their children and young adults to engage in self-paced learning, carefully adapted to their needs and attractively presented, it would massively counteract the school systems in the cities. It could turn information-poor people into information-rich ones ... A globalized community could bring huge additional opportunities for its citizens ... an electronic version of Periclean Athens.

'And if not? If technology fails to educate and to train, the night-mare scenario takes over: technology is employed to oversee and to control'. (7)

Hall and Mumford are perhaps not vastly far apart, though Mumford could not envision the potential Big Brother horrors of the electronic age, and Hall's idealism is less surely Utopian than Mumford's. But both are certain that regeneration of the educational system, every element from kindergarten to post-graduate institution, is vital for the decent development of society and civilization. But how are we to transfer the ideals of disseminated learning, both physical and electronic, into three dimensions?

A social activity

First of all, it is vital to remember that education is a social activity, Though technology gives us a individuals the ability to learn and acquire knowledge in previously impossible and particular ways, every educational institution is in some sense a society, and everyone should be socialized through the experience of education. It is impossible to get any real notion of society by looking at computer screens. The ways in which the ideals of citizenship and social consideration can be fostered obviously have to change with the age of the participants. As Mumford said, they should be done in steps.