This book explores the relationship between American curricula and school architecture in the nineteenth century. The need for a more nuanced history of schooling in the US is all too apparent given todayâs pedagogical landscape. Over the last few decades, American education has increasingly moved away from its founding democratic commitments of introducing students to a vast range of scholarly traditions in ways that nurture curiosity, critical capacities, and confidence. Instead, our children spend their days learning that success means getting the right answers on a standardized testâany other intellectual pursuit is a waste of their already limited time (Saltman & Gabbard, 2010). Security guards and police patrol our schoolsâ already prison-like learning environments, their presence telling our kids that theyâre not to be trusted from day one, reminding them that stepping a toe out of line is not youthful experimentation, but criminal behavior deserving of zero-tolerance and, in some cases, strong-armed arrests (Giroux, 2009). Weâre fining children for being too poor to afford a healthy lunch (Siegel, 2013). And weâre sorting students by class and competency, the pressure of state standards leaving little room for teachers to consider the complexities and undoubtable potential of young life beyond background. In short, for our kids, coming of age in America means survivingânot thriving inâschool (Saltman & Gabbard, 2010). I want to know where we went wrong.
To be sure, the answer to such a question reaches far beyond this study. But what I hope to do here by unpacking nineteenth century schoolhouse1 design and curriculum2 is offer a history with which we might better understand the issues in American education today. The nineteenth century was a deeply influential time for American education: it saw the concretization of the earliest forms and aims of the nationâs schooling and the development and standardization of the curricula and school architecture from which our current system emergesâin short, growing in this period like no other in American history, nineteenth century schooling firmly established the nationâs pedagogical norms. This history thus exposes certain assumptions about what education should be from this period that, though they might have been forgotten over time, nevertheless continue to shape contemporary schooling. By making the nineteenth century nuances of American education clear, I hope to offer a site of inquiry for exploring the power structures of contemporary American education, an institution in desperate need of change. Though schoolhouses stand as complex and immensely formative sites, though they hold such transformative potential for the students who dwell within them, we relegate them too often to the backdrop of educational and architectural tapestries. Very often their conditionsâhowever poorâare naturalized and ignored in public discourse. School(house) Design and Curriculum in Nineteenth Century America stands as a reminder that schoolhouses are critical sites of interrogation and intervention in education.
Certainly, I am not the first to have these concerns. Many scholars have already exposed the formative impact of architecture and curricula in nineteenth century America and beyond.
There is a common sense that school facilities matter; that their architecture does indeed impact learning. This sense is captured in a speech delivered by Churchill to the House of Commons in October of 1944 in which he articulates that â[t]here is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our livesâ (Churchill, 1994). Similarly concerned about architectureâs formative power, thinkers such as D. Vitiello, M. Clapper, G. E. Thomas, and A. S. Weisser have carefully documented developments in US schoolhouse forms, which focus on school design, siting, planning, and administration.
In a 2006 article published in the Journal of Planning History titled âRe-Forming Schools and Cities: Placing Education on the Landscape of Planning Historyâ, Vitiello introduces the integration of education with its corresponding schoolhouse history. He acknowledges that there has historically been a lack of discussion around their integration and opens avenues to explore the role of education in planning history. According to Vitiello (2006), the collaborations produced a number of related questions that the authors attempted to answer, which are worth quoting at length here:
- How have school design and planning shaped the physical and social fabric of city and suburban neighborhoods?
- How does public school planning tell us about citizenship, power, and the state in neighborhoods, cities, and regions? What have been the meanings of âpublicâ in public school design and development? What does the history of education suggest about the relationship between church and state in planning and policy?
- How have race, class, and gender shaped the politics of education reform and school development? (Since women have made up the vast bulk of the educational workforce in the United States since the nineteenth century, the history of schools represents an especially promising area for exploring the roles of women in planning.)
- How have students, teachers, neighborhood residents, and architects shaped education-together or in competition with district administrators and educational pundits and reformers, the typical protagonists of educational histories?
- How have the public and private economies of school building been organized in divergent contexts of urban growth and decline?
- What challenges and opportunities face planners engaged in school reform, and how can planning historians contribute to current and future debates about school reform? (p. 186)
These questions have helped to inform and shape the question of how race, class, and gender shaped the politics of education in the nineteenth century. In the volumes of published reports of the Rhode Island Board of Education in the nineteenth century, the silence concerning women governance is deafening, which is second only to the screams in the deliberate omission of education of persons of color.
In Clapperâs 2006 article, âSchool Design, Site Selection, and Political Geography of Race in Postwar Philadelphiaâ, he reveals the ways in which the school siting and design process in post-World War II Philadelphia escalated racial inequities in the city and suburban school system despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to prohibit segregation. He documents how schools built in urban African-American communities demonstrate catastrophic disparities when compared to their suburban counterparts, and in doing so, shines a light on the ways in which school design can function as a racist mechanism of social control. He draws attention to the centralized educational and architectural professionals responsible for the inequities, as well as the financial failure of the state and federal governments to remedy these inequities.
In a 2006 article, âFrom Our House to the Big Houseâ, George Thomas brilliantly posits that Philadelphia public schools are products of the dominant ideologies of their time, supporting his claim by analyzing The Public School Buildings of the City of Philadelphia, seven volumes that document the development of the cityâs schools from 1745 to the early 1800s. Thomas claims that
Finding that Philadelphia school designs mimic familiar architectural prototypes, such as the house, mansion, church, mill, factory, prison, fortress, and office park, Thomas argues that these prototypes reflect the values of the culture that were popular at the time they were built. More recently, Gyure examines the high school schoolhouse over the course of 150 years in his 2011 book, The Chicago Schoolhouse, taking us from the schoolhouseâs beginnings in the 1820s through its transformative period from the 1880s to the 1920s and into its current form. Throughout, Gyure sheds light on the histories that underpin todayâs educational architecture and argues that schoolhouses reflect curricular improvements and inventions.When education was embedded in the home, schools looked like houses; when education became civic, schools took on a civic character; when Philadelphia gave itself to the forces of industry, schools were derived from industry. In the twentieth century, as schools became places of conflict, they took on the character of the architecture of reform-prisons. (p. 218)
Weisser, in her 2006 article titled âLittle Red School House, What now? Two Centuries of American Public School Architectureâ, briefly articulates the relationships between educational philosophy and schoolhouse shapes. Weisser (2006) describes the 200-year history she traces as âa typical American story of call and response: reformers consistently demand greater clarity and amenity in the face of perceived unhealthy disarray, and communities regularly soldier on with inherited structures that have proven suitable for generationsâ (p. 214). This residual pastness tension between extant stru...