It's not an original idea of mine that many new government schools look oddly like prisons, except for the absence of razor wire (that may be coming soon). My point about contemporary school architecture has not only been made by others; I submit it's really self-evident.
The new schools also look like manufacturing plants or distribution centers. Rather few of the former are being built, around here anyway; but we do have some of the latter, new ones and very large, sited here in Odessa in West Texas in recent years because of our location on an Interstate and our adjacency to Mexico. Actually, I-20 as it runs through here is also known as La Entrada al Pacifico. There are signs up to that effect. The projected road system, of which this stretch of I-20 is one leg, is to go directly south to Ciudad Chihuahua and then turn west to terminate in Puerto Topolobampo, Mexico, on the east coast of the Golfo de California.
Just now the Ector County School District is building additions to several schools. The School District is a very big deal. It is the biggest enterprise by far in the county. It enrolls 26,000 students (58% Hispanic), "mostly from Odessa" (pop. 96,000), attending 41 "campuses" served by 3,327 employees, of whom 1,702 are instructional staff (presumably that means teachers). The District's website announces that a current $89 million bond issue is enabling a number of construction projects. That's nearly $1,000 of new debt per man, woman, and child in Odessa.
Of the two pictures here of some of that new construction, the one below is an addition to an elementary school dubbed an “Early Learning Center,” and the one above is an expansion of a junior high school. They look to me forbidding and Bastille-like, but I suppose there are those who would consider me neurotic for making such a remark. In general, I think the local view is that these are excellent additions to the best possible school system in the best possible . . . , etc., etc.
But I ask you, in all fairness, to tell me if you think that hulk of a learning center (the picture does not do justice to its windowless bulk) is a building you would like your four-year-old to disappear into. I admit that the website says it is going to provide an abundance of natural light for its young occupants, so perhaps I didn't photograph the right view. If they hung out a sign saying it was "The Minitrue," it would not raise an eyebrow. (The Minitrue was Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984, you will recall, which now appears to have its own website.)
What game is given away by this architecture? Actually, it's quite a simple one. These new schools, prisons, factories, and distribution warehouses are all boxes for holding things, sorting them out, and issuing them on demand to other "centers." It's all mass production and assembly line stuff. The boxes are for "processing." They can't, by definition, have anything to do with real education, which, God save us, means (this is the view the etymology supports) to lead out (educere) of the student what he needs for effective performance in life and personal spiritual realization.
I daresay that last point would get a laugh in any teachers' lounge where you tried it on for size. But I believe, and I have Plato and many others for support, that what we most need for personal development and integrity is innate and God-given. Education's purpose is to rend the veil, oppose the original fault, destroy the ignorance (Hindu: avidya) that blocks us from realization of what we are.
True schooling is personal and is best done in small settings. Whereas a man, a student, a boy or girl, is "bigger than a city" and needs to be so valued. (That paraphrases a line of Emerson's. I believe it.) But a school needn't be, shouldn't be, over-large. What does learning have to do with vast piles of bricks and mortar, swelling community debt, and high per capita costs of "education"?
A student needs a teacher. The one room school, on which America was to a large extent built, and about which Linda Schrock Taylor has recently written so winningly on this site ("The Feds Filched Our One-Room Schools" and "Lessons by the Yard"), consisted typically of a set of pupils of many ages and a single harried teacher, but she (sometimes he) did a great job and was assisted in it by the older students, who didn't get a chance to clique off into a peer group and make trouble for themselves. They were too busy looking out for the younger kids or dodging the teacher's ire if they were misbehaving. (I am not claiming all this was heaven incarnate, only that it was better than the system that has replaced it.)
I've lately had reason to try to get the feel of an elementary school classroom in New England about 1890. I'm not there yet, but a good friend I've known nearly sixty years ponied up the following when I asked him for his recollections of going to school in rural Vermont about 1937, that is, nearly a half century after my target date:
"I attended elementary school in Northfield Falls, Vermont, just a mile and a half south of Northfield. It was in a two-story frame building, the first floor for grades 1 thru 4 and the second floor 5 thru 8. [On the second floor] we had a schoolmarm named Effie Hutchinson, who brooked no nonsense from any of us who would try to get out of hand. She kept a piece of sawed-off rubber hose in her desk and was wont to use it on us whenever the spirit moved her. As I remember it, the curriculum consisted of English grammar (sentence parsing, etc), reading, writing, mathematics (pre-algebra), geography, and physiology. She taught all four classes in all subjects rotating from one class to the next. This was common in those days. I did it myself in my first teaching job in Maine, also in a two-story frame building."
Notice that my friend remembers his teacher's name nearly 70 years later. I remember the names of the nuns I had as teachers in a much larger (brick) suburban Catholic school about the same time: Sister Macharias, Sister Lillian, Sister Mursita (sp?), Sister Justin. . . . I particularly recall sentence parsing, at which I was the very devil. That delighted the sisters. They liked boys who liked sentence parsing. I'm not at all sure sentence parsing did anything for my standing among the boys in the class or for my character as a true red-blooded male but, oh well, sentence parsing was fun because I could do it; it seemed a mystery to many; and my fledgling ego got a boost thereby.
Personal. Small. Effective. Homeschoolers have relearned the trick of getting older kids to help younger ones. Good for the older ones, good for the younger ones as Linda Taylor makes clear. The curse of contemporary education – well, it's no good making a remark like that. There is not one curse of contemporary (elementary and secondary) education; there are many, and they are all grievous. Big, impersonal schools, charged with turning out human "units" to fit into the economy, are simply one of the bad things. One of the names of this is "School-to-Work." We have another Big Bastille built just a few years ago that is devoted at the secondary level to something called "careers."
Another curse of contemporary education, perhaps the worst one, is TV. TV, in fact, is where much of the real "education" of today's average youngster goes on, from toddlerhood up. Whatever kind of intellectual and moral wasteland you may think the big central school is, it is a virtual cloistered convent teaching Latin, Greek, and Mozart compared with the savage and degenerate world TV presents. It is watched more hours per day by the average student than that student spends in classroom.
The late Clifton Fadiman complained many years ago that TV had set up a "rival school system" which was more encompassing and more effective than the government (he called it the "public") school system. He was addressing a convocation of school teachers. No doubt they all agreed and nodded their heads sagely. And did nothing. Fadiman should have lived on a while to see how bad TV could get.
Just now, our county school district is embroiled in a vast battle at the top level. I haven't followed the details. I suppose I would if I had children in the system. It appears that the newly elected board of trustees is unhappy with the superintendent and the failure of the local schools to shine in the State of Texas testing rigamarole. Just prior to the 4th holiday weekend rumors were flying around that the super had emptied out his office; the assistant super appears to be already gone. Perhaps one or both were involved in another town scandal (I'll not go there); and the board has called in lawyers to study a buy-out of the super's contract, already bruited to cost in the range of $150,000. It is a mess, worthy at our boondocks level of the kind of thing that goes on in Washington, the place, as Linda Taylor says, where all the awful engrossing, centralizing, bad-education nonsense came from in the first place. The schools we have now are an instrument of federal policy, and that policy means us "peeuhpul" no good.
The only sane thing to do would be to offer up the big-box school buildings for lease or sale as offices and distribution centers and return education to small neighborhood schools and to teachers that parents both trust and direct. Palliations are all going to fail. But the school dilemma is just another one of those situations, like the Iraq war, where the thing to do is obvious – abandon present course; about face – but the will to do it is missing. Or rather the contrary will is all-powerful. So it's slog on, drearily and hopelessly. And when in doubt, hire an architect and build something big and mean that'll impress the tax-paying boobs.
July 6, 2004
