Opinion: Dreaming About An Elementary School. An Imaginary Checklist

Thanks to Jennifer Shiao, Toni Cunningham, and others I am trying to follow the conversations taking place among those responsible for the design of a new elementary school. Not for the first time, I am a bit bewildered and saddened by discussions that ought to take place at the end of the planning process, taking place instead at the beginning and thus squeezing out basic questions that ought to be the preliminary steps. I appreciate the concerns about square feet and costs, but I do want to suggest that, so far at least, there appears to be no way of basing these metrics upon the activities we hope will occur in the building.

I want to imagine questions that the building committee, architects, school committee, teachers and administrators and, yes, children might address in the process of designing an educational environment (a more evocative way of saying “building a school”). They are the sorts of questions which take us back to those assumptions and attitudes that we may not know we have, that serve as blinders to possibilities that are more open right now than they will ever be again. 

1.  Let’s say that we are building a school facility meant to last for 50 years, as Wildwood and Fort River have lasted. What do we think education will look like in 2070? What do we want it to look like? If the answer to either or both of those questions is “I don’t know,” how do we build a school that is supportive of education for five decades? (My guess is that “I don’t know” is the best answer we can give, and that requires that we build a facility with multi-functional flexibility.)
   
2. This will be the first elementary school built since the age of computers began, the first since the internet, the first since social media began to dominate the way we read, write, talk, and relate to one another. In truth, this will be the first school for young children since the modern age began. The building plans seem to modestly acknowledge the climate crisis, but why do we not talk about a human communications crisis? What are we educating our young children to be able to do?  To want to do?
   
3. We are planning to build this new school during a pandemic in which enlightened thinking seems to be dividing into two camps: How do we return to normalcy? and, How do we learn to live with this virus and possibly newer strains and viruses? Does addressing this issue have an impact on how we build our school? Should it?
   
4. For almost the entire 50 years since our last elementary schools were built, the distinction between Regular Education and Special Education has both dominated and disfigured our thinking about schooling. Almost immediately in the ’70s we heard children described as “special needs students,” a gross and ghastly mischaracterization which transferred the idea of “special education” from services provided to the children receiving those services. The idea behind special education was praiseworthy —- to avoid segregating children with learning or behavioral difficulties — but it soon became the rationale for their segregation into special classrooms for much of their school life. Should we be rethinking the distinction between Special and Regular Education as we design our new school?
   
5. Our need for meta-knowledge is growing, as our need for basic skills is decreasing. That is to say, we need desperately to learn how to think mathematically and let our devices do the math under our supervision. Our math education has been recently restored to a kind of thinning out: everyone learns arithmetic, many learn algebra, some learn geometry and a few learn trigonometry and the calculus. Heroic efforts to rethink this in the 1960s and 1970s were shot down and this was a great misfortune. Under the unfortunate rubric “The New Math” all children learned to appreciate that counting, abstracting, and modeling were not only the essential tools of mathematical thinking but also of mathematical imagination. I think we gave up much too soon, although I may be wrong since I haven’t kept up with curriculum. But if anyone starting in about the fourth grade began to hate “story problems” it is because they were not introduced to mathematical thinking at younger ages. What are the implications for the design of educational spaces of changes in thinking about our curricula over the years? Can we anticipate changes in the next decades? Are people who think about curriculum part of the Building Committee?
   
6. Starting in about the middle of the second grade, reading and writing muscle their way into curriculum dominance, and from that point on success in school is dependent upon them. Children who have difficulties with them struggle on tests, find themselves with “special needs,” and are separated for significant amounts of time from their age peers and from other curricular activities at which they might excel. For many children, the emphasis upon their deficiencies prevents them from discovering and developing their strengths, what psychologist Howard Gardner referred to as “multiple intelligences.” If a school were to devote as much energy and attention to developing these intelligences as to remediating deficiencies what might it look like?
   
7. Classrooms are the default way of organizing spaces in schools, and that is probably because of the good things they make possible: the safety and supervision of children, the encouragement of friendships among age peers, and the orderly sequencing of curriculum. But what about the harm they do? Organizing by grade means that classrooms will have age uniformity but a wide diversity of capacities, predispositions and strengths. How can classrooms deal with these diversities while maintaining the things they do well? Pre-school and kindergarten teachers have answers to these questions and I have often said, mostly seriously, that all classrooms ought to resemble pre-school classrooms. What if they did? What other modifications of classroom organization would make the school more capable of developing multiple strengths in an encouraging and non-competitive environment?
   
8. What makes a building nurturing? Our new school will be a place that children and adults share for over six hours a day for at least 180 days a year. It is a place where children and adults can get tired, hungry, and angry as well as excited, happy and helpful. Children and adults can bring out the best in each other — and also the worst. Children bring their fears and joys with them to school. So do adults. How can a school be nurturing to all the people, younger and older, who study and work there? How can they all feel that school is a place where they can participate in one another’s growth? It is difficult in this age of testing. As we want children to grow in confidence about their agency, to feel free to take risks, to get clear and supportive feedback, they also need to feel cared for and cared about. How can the design of our new elementary school accomplish that?
   

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.