‘Child-centric’ schools
Neal
Peirce / Syndicated columnist
Originally posted March
30, 2004
"Child-centric" is the name that developer William Gietema applies to
the new elementary school being built in Hometown, a New Urbanist community
northeast of Fort Worth.
The energy-conserving building will have many windows and be flooded with
natural light, which research shows stimulates melatonin and in turn endorphins
that make children happy — and thus ready to learn more rapidly. Air exchange
will also be boosted to cycle carbon monoxide out and more oxygen in — another
favor to the children.
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your salary to any teacher’s
Set in a compact new town with 6-foot-wide sidewalks, trees along the streets
and traffic-calming features, this school will be just across the road from the
city recreation center, next to a performing-arts center and new city library.
And 8 acres of the 10-acre site, notes Gietema, will go for child use —
classrooms, playground and a forested environmental-learning area, with just 2
acres given over to parking and bus areas — uses which normally gobble up half
of most new school sites.
"Instead of a school designed around the drive-through," notes Gietema,
"we designed the school first, then came up with a method to allow parents
to deliver and pick up their children without damaging the school’s
design."
The green light for Hometown’s innovative school design came from Stephen
Waddell, superintendent of the Birdville School District. "We intend this
school to be flexible for people working there today as well as 30 years from
now," Waddell explains. "The design incorporates flexibility, allows
different teaming opportunities for kids and teachers."
Plus, Waddell boasts, "this school is being built so that the community can
use it after hours." Community and library rooms upfront, for example, are
open to learning opportunities for adults after hours, even while other parts of
the building are secured.
Futurist thinker-consultant Ian Jukes, director of the InfoSavvy
Group, stoked the intellectual fires of the school officials, planners and
architects (HKS of Dallas) when designing the Hometown school. Jukes argues
the old formula of "Stand and Deliver" — a teacher before a class
giving kids facts they’ll be required to regurgitate — is hopelessly outdated.
Teachers are no longer "masters," he suggests, when kids, from their
desktops, have instant access to every library or museum on the planet.
Yet most schools, Jukes notes, look like they did in the 1860s, before
telephones, telecommunications or the gas-powered motor. He dismisses the rigid
standards approach of No Child Left Behind as "a rearview mirror of what
education has to be all about." Instead, he’d aim to develop skills of
independent, highly resourceful thinking to prepare children for lives in which
they may experience a dozen or more careers "in jobs not yet invented,
technologies not invented, problems not thought of yet."
This
is what it means to educate The
21st Century Student.
So many new schools look alike, asserts Prakash Nair, international
school-building consultant and architect, because we continue to
"warehouse" children with too little thought to how the design will
impact student learning. Every business/professional group, from construction to
maintenance, transportation to curriculum to security, lays out requirements.
But who’s responsible for learning?
Nair suggests how smaller, learning-centered schools might be configured. For
example: multipurpose "learning studios," where children can be
engaged in flexible learning zones that replace traditional classrooms; atriums
and other open areas, encouraging student interaction, in place of traditional
corridors; wireless laptops and other Internet-connected digital communications
devices available to students where and when they need them.
A big point of the reformers is that students, especially older ones, can
gain immensely by spending big chunks of time learning outside the school, in
libraries, parks, museums, community service and school-to-work programs.
Elliott Washor of the Big
Picture Company, co-inventor of the precedent-shattering Met
School in Providence, R.I., describes the ideal new school as "a
welcoming space," accommodating multiple types of learning.
Most of the same old architects grinding out the same old, banal school
structures are oblivious to these new cutting-edge ideas. Cleveland is using its
$1.5-billion fund for new schools so unimaginatively that it’s "on the
verge of a major public architectural catastrophe," a member of the
Cleveland Landmarks Commission (Theodore Sande) told Cleveland Plain Dealer
architectural critic Steven Litt.
Litt asks: Couldn’t the school district collaborate with Cleveland State
University and Kent State to organize a national symposium on state-of-the-art
architecture and community-related planning?
To me, that’s a crackerjack idea. The school-design issues need to be hauled out
of bureaucrats’ offices, into the sunlight of spirited communitywide
discussions. America’s universities could serve their communities well by
igniting the debate.
Why is it that these futurists and so many other forward thinking educational reformist all assume that students will be interested, motivated, disciplined, etc to such a degree that they’ll want to / be able to study independently in libraries, parks, museums and other venues?
Comment by daniel — November 27, 2005 @ 2:22 amSounds like “unschooling” on a large-scale, community-sized level. Can a community succeed at that? Montessori is one attempt in that direction–it’s awfully hard for one teacher to motivate a classroom full of kids to pursue independent learning. Maybe what we need is more incentive for parents to homeschool. Isn’t that the way God designed the family? To “train children in the way they should go”?
Really, it’s not about motivating kids–they’re natural scientists. It’s about not killing their natural curiousity so early in life. But kids these days have had traditional school pumped into them from before they could write their own names–it will take more than a well-lit school building to re-ignite their ability to think for themselves.
But who really wants that? We adults are afraid that we’ll lose our grip on power if we free our children to think independently. Government certainly doesn’t want its citizens thinking outside the box. Employers don’t want employees getting fed up with their situation and going off to do their own thing. Our schools train our children to be “good citizens” who don’t rock the boat and “good employees” who will slave away for decades and then be satisfied with a small but regular pension check. We don’t want to have to face problems ourselves–we want government and bosses and insurance companies to shoulder all the risk, but then we’ll raise a meek objection when they get all the potential profit.
As long as adults aren’t ready to accept both the risk and the payoff of thinking independently ourselves, we will continue to imprison our children in schools that are literally designed with much the same floor plans as penitentiaries, and praise these minors for conforming enough to get an “A”, so they can go to the right college and make more “A’s”, so they can get the right job and work quietly for the rest of their lives.
From a homeschooling mom…
Comment by Jill — November 27, 2005 @ 11:58 amWhy are you attacking teacher salaries and not other public servants.
Police and firemen make good salaries and get similar or better benefits than teachers. But no one attacks them. Why? Because the budget that pays for these workers is not under the direct scrutiny of the general public. You quote studies that show that having a master’s degree doesn’t make one a better teacher. Well, experience makes you a better teacher, a masters degree makes you master your subject better. What the problem is, until recently, it didn’t matter what you got your masters in, whether is was related to what you taught or not. I have a masters degree and then some, all in physics. I teach in one of the better schools in New York City. My students always do well on the NYS Regents Exam. Many teachers work hours beyond their regular day. There are two young earth science teachers in my department that arrive at school 7 AM in the morning and usually don’t leave before 3 PM and then take work home with them. Over my career I have accepted jobs that added many hours to my work week. Sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn’t. In fact, most of the time I didn’t. So, there are many things all your studies miss. The hours teachers put in, the effort they put in to their students, the handholding, the teaching after and/or before school are not accounted for with your arguments against teachers’ salaries. Granted, there are a few bad apples, but you have that in any profession. The key to getting better qualified teachers in the classroom is to make requirements more rigorous and uniform. The system is to blame for many of the bad apples as well as administrators who give bad teachers good recommendations to get rid of them. Your study on the subject of teachers’ salaries is basically a statistical one with nothing more than a collecting of data you can get from the internet. Try visiting schools, talking to teachers, parents and kids. Statistics can be used to prove almost anything if there is premeditated agenda behind the study. Your thesis is prejudiced and slanted.
Sincerely yours,
Steven Scharf
Comment by Steven Scharf — July 23, 2007 @ 12:55 amSteven, I’m wondering whether you think it’s possible to have a thesis that isn’t prejudiced and slanted if the conclusion is that teacher salaries are too high? I take it that your position on the issue is neutral and objective.
Comment by Jerry — July 23, 2007 @ 6:13 pmHave you ever taught? Anyone with a college degree can become a substitute teacher. I suggest you teach for a few days or more in Albany, Schenectady, or Troy. Then you will be qualified to critique our pay.
Comment by DLF51 — June 12, 2008 @ 10:13 pmSure I’ve taught–law in colleges. But do I also have to be an oil rigger to be qualified to critique the price of oil? Since educator wages are set primarily by political forces, every citizen is qualified to critique educators’ salaries.
Comment by Jerry — June 12, 2008 @ 10:53 pm