I dream of entirely different learning spaces for children of the future. My dream is for classrooms – open as well as closed – to be replaced with the spaces beyond the walls of the school: the great big wide-open world.
In the spring of 2019, there was a heated debate between the architect, Rosan Bosch, on the one hand, and professor of psychology, Svend Brinkmann, on the other. Bosch stated that the classroom as we know it is an antiquated relic, and that the teaching spaces of the future will look completely different and will afford children and youth quite various, self-chosen opportunities for learning. Brinkman objected to what he called the “total disruption of school traditions by structurelessness”.
Both are a little bit right, of course. Bosch is right that the classroom is obsolete, and Brinkmann is right to protest against lack of structure. But they are both wrong to focus on the classroom and the schools they constitute as the learning spaces of the future.
I dream of entirely different learning spaces for children of the future. My dream is for classrooms – open as well as closed – to be replaced with the spaces beyond the walls of the school: the great big wide-open world. Nature and neighborhoods and museums and public transportation and sports centers and businesses and micro-communities and more nature and playgrounds and libraries and playing fields and other businesses and city hall and and and – the sky’s the limit!
I want the whole world to be our children’s learning spaces with all its richness of impressions and experiences and actions and places and processes and systems. The very world that we are presently keeping children fenced out of, trapped in huge prison-like institutions, where the conditions and possibilities and processes and systems are so different.
In the future I dream of, school will merely be children’s base camp, where they meet, gather and prepare for the day. Afterwards some with work in Bosch’s open learning spaces, and other will set out into the world to explore, visit and revisit. For the early grades base camp will be alpha and omega as they practice exploring the world in bits and pieces. They can take regular visits to the same spots in nature to sense the weather and the turn of the seasons, and they can go for regular walks in the neighborhood in every widening circles; on foot, on bike and by public transport, and these trips will be linked to learning activities at base camp. Not all trips will be that short; it’s good to get out of the comfort zone and struggle a little – it builds resilience and team spirit.
As the children grow older the trips can get longer and more complex – but as always, they are interwoven with learning and anchored by research and learning activities at base camp. Often several subjects are interwoven in one trip – or a series of trips – because the world isn’t separated according to school subjects. After all, school subjects are just a system that structures a certain kind of teaching.
The Brinkmanns of the world might object that this will lead to “structurelessness”, that is to say, that the children will have no structure and that this will be unhealthy or unconducive to learning. I counter that this will teach them to move comfortably in more or less or differently structured settings, and to internalize their own personal structure for coping with these various spaces.
In my opinion this is essential learning, and the fact that our present educational system habituates children to the institutional structures of schools – with all their affordances and limitations – is a grave mistake. Children need to feel safe and competent in the world, they need to learn to meet it with confidence and curiosity, knowing that they are an integral part of it and where and how they fit. These are competencies that many children don’t acquire till much later in life.
This doesn’t mean we are going to fling the world at children in the first grade. We don’t toss The Great Gatsby or algebra or strong French verbs at them from the get-go. It means that we will scaffold their progress out into the world, the same way we scaffold their progress in English and geography.
Transforming school spaces into base camps and giving children access to the world will solve one of the biggest challenges the educational system faces today: many children find school to be meaningless and the learning activities they are offered to be boring and irrelevant.
Shifting the balance from days and weeks and years spent cooped up in school to a back-and-forth between base camp and the rest of the world will also address the need to make schools more responsive to the moment, more agile and renewable. And shifting learning activities from receiving or obeying to the proactive doing of exploration will do so much to engage children learningly in the world.
All this forms the basis for sustainable learning, that is to say, preparing children to meet their own future learning needs by fostering both curiosity and the confidence to seek out learning and teaching at will and when necessary.
This is the school I dream of for future generations of children.
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