Opinion: Dreaming About An Elementary School. Spaces
Discovery Elementary School, Arlington=, VA. Photo: nea.org
Let’s dream a little. We are planning an elementary school, and all the models we have in our minds are more or less variations of the schools we went to as children and that our children are currently going to in Amherst. Classrooms, halls, a library, a cafeteria, a gym, offices. How different can a new school be? How different do we want it to be? The town was badly bruised by the architectural experiment behind Wildwood and Fort River Schools, and the temptation to return to what we know and are comfortable with, single classrooms, is understandable.
The problem is that the classroom is a pretty useless environment for teaching and learning. For controlling and monitoring it is satisfactory, But for the work of education of young children it is unworkable, as generations of teachers would agree. When I went to elementary school in the 1930s and 40s the classroom was the unit for instruction. Most often the desks and chairs were bolted to the floor, unmovable, Thirty or so children read the same texts, answered the same questions, took the same tests. The children had in common only that they were more or less the same age but that was the determinant for classroom groupings.
By the time I arrived in Amherst, in 1970, to become principal of Mark’s Meadow School, this had changed dramatically but not easily. We were all coming to grips with the realization that a common age cohort contained a multitude of differences. It was rare to find a classroom with desks in rows. Desks (and children) were grouped differently throughout the day. With the advent of Chapter 766, the Special Education Law, children were moving in and out of the classroom throughout the day. Instrumental music lessons, sometimes conducted in closets because there were no other appropriate spaces available, also took young musicians out of their classrooms, necessarily according to a music schedule, not a classroom schedule,
I could go on, but the previous paragraph will be familiar to elementary school teachers. It is important that it be familiar to the Elementary School Building Committee and the architects as well. What kinds of spaces should our new school include to accommodate an approach to education that embraces differences in interests, life experiences, traditions, and learning rates and modalities? How can the school’s architecture be flexible enough to serve new and different understandings of education during the, say, sixty years of its life? What does the internet compel us to consider? The climate crisis? The threat to democratic institutions? What should our architecture reflect about the relationship between indoors and outdoors, the relationship between physical, intellectual and emotion growth, about how we help students with stress and anxiety?
My twenty-one years at Mark’s Meadow, working with a superb staff, taught me a lot about all this and much more. I plan to write a series of opinion pieces dealing with ideas that perhaps do not ordinarily enter into the conversation between a building committee and architects. I hope they may be interesting, and even useful, and I welcome comments, questions and criticism.
Michael Greenebaum was Principal of Mark’s Meadow School from 1970 to 1991, and from 1974 taught Organization Studies in the Higher Education Center at the UMass School of Education. He served in Town Meeting from 1992, was on the first Charter Commission in 1993, and served on several town committees including the Town Commercial Relations Committee and the Long Range Planning Committee.
Imagine a “school” which has a creek running through it, filled with crayfish and salamanders. A big tree leans over the creek, and it sports a scary (to a 4-year-old-me) rope-swing that older kids use to cross (or get wet).
The creek valley is wooded, and from the trees hang thick knotted vines, great for climbing or hiding and seeking — and for developing spatial awareness (learning 3-dimensional geometry and topology) as a 5-year-old.
An old mill by the creek houses the one-room library, the principal’s office, and the closet with the mimeograph machine — that damp, aromatic precursor to the dry (Xerox) copier — which we use to publish our own stories starting as 3-year-olds.
The art building is an old barn, replete with paints and clay and glazes — and somewhere out of sight is a kiln where are creations are fired. Classrooms are scattered among several simple buildings, but there’s at least as much time outdoors for free play or “organized” sports — often muddy kickball where the scores get so big, we discover as 6-year-olds that it’s simpler to keep track of the difference and invent negative numbers.
Many other private discoveries will remain unmentioned, but here’s the most chaste and mind-blowing: on a shelf behind the cuisenaire rods, whose lengths run from 1 to 10, sits a square cuisenaire block representing 10×10=100 and cubic block representing 10x10x10=1,000; in a flash, I wonder what the 10,000 or 100,000 or … blocks would look like, and — as the (very long) hair on the back of my for 6-year-old neck tries to stand up — I suddenly realize … there are higher-dimensions!!!!!
This is my dream school: the Miquon School, just outside Philadelphia, from 1963 to 1968; unmentioned are the many beloved teachers and friends, a more diverse group than at any other school I’ve known, many now long gone….
Amherst already hosts a college in this spirit, but I wonder if we can dream of hosting a public school like this for our younger kids, starting in 2026?
Rob, you don’t have to dream. If you had visited any Amherst kindergarten in the 1970s you would have found cuisenaire rods, conic blocks, hoops for creating sets and a host of other paraphernalia associated with the “New Math” of the sixties. (No rope swing, though.). The New Math was wonderful although it was much despised. It was intended to teach young children how to think mathematically, not just perform arithmetical operations in a rote manner. 5-year-old minds are wonderful too, but perhaps there was not a good match between their teachers and the abstracting required for adults to appreciate set theory or to undo their own fear of mathematical thinking.. The pedagogy was age-appropriate, however.
And if you had visited Mark’s Meadow a few years later, you would have found, thanks to Shirley DeShields, older children competing to create Well-Formed Sentences in the logic games that she was researching. It turns out, though, that logical space and the real world are two separate realms.
Still, I have always maintained that all classrooms (including graduate school) should resemble pre-school classrooms, and it sounds like the Miquon School did. Perhaps the new school could be built across the Fort River and we could incorporate the rope swing too!
Michael, I heartily agree with your sentiments, and echo “I have always maintained that all classrooms (including graduate school) should resemble pre-school classrooms” in particular.
Your leadership at Marks Meadow was why (in 1989) we petitioned to have our son open enroll in Kindergarten there the following year. Alas, the nearby creek was devoid of crayfish, and although there was no rope-swing, our walks home along the wooded path back to Van Meter Drive offered a semblance of the Miquon environment.
The Miquon experience was shaped by dynamic couple of progressive educators,
Don and Lore Rassmussen, who left their mark there, as well as in the Philadelphia public schools and beyond.
When looking for more about them to share, I found this (in the photo are the aforementioned 10, 100, 1000 blocks that I found hiding on a shelf in 1966, a year after Lore and and Don had moved on to bigger things:
https://1440walnut.net/frame.Right4Philadelphia.htm