PAGE 3. Continued from page 2.

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“Tackling the Crime of School Design”
Book Excerpt from Rena Upitis, former Dean of Education at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario; currently Professor of Arts Education at Queen’s University.

Full biographical and contact information available on page 7.
Citations on page 8.

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Despite all of this, I do not find myself thinking much about people in prisons. Having stared blankly at the concrete walls of prisons for so many years, I have become desensitized to their very presence. At best, the prisons of Kingston remain in the periphery of my vision. Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson says we display a sort of blindness as we focus on narrow goals and press ahead. We pay attention to only a fraction of what is before us, blocking out our peripheral vision with no sense of a larger picture. ( 10 ) Bateson writes about how her father, Gregory Bateson, wondered if this phenomenon was a flaw of human perception or whether it developed because of the mechanistic and reductionist view of the world that permeates the psyche and actions of our communities. I suspect it’s the latter.

Gregory Bateson’s work on systems theory is central to the ideas in this book. His remarkable ways of thinking about the many dimensions affecting human behaviour were hugely influenced by his early anthropological studies in New Guinea and Bali. For the next several decades his work crossed many disciplinary boundaries, including those of cybernetics, ethnography, anthropology, environmental studies, psychiatry, animal communication, biological evolution, and systems theory. Relevant to the current discussion are Bateson’s observations about play, exploration, and crime—and, as it turns out, architecture and schools.

In Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Bateson made a distinction between “crime” and “criminal actions”. He said society acts as if crime could be extinguished simply by punishing criminal actions, although he claims the opposite is the case. ( 11 ) The statistics support Bateson’s view—the more we punish criminal actions, the more crime rates soar. There is a profound difference between changing the structure of a system and merely messing around with its components. Context is also profound: action takes meaning from context. ( 12 ) Jumping over fences could be play and could be crime. Let me illustrate with an example.

Urban Free Flow is a new and somewhat subversive pursuit that has become popular with urban youth. It is an activity intimately connected with architecture and cityscapes and with the physical urge to climb and run so prevalent among young people, especially athletic young males, in their late teens and early twenties. Criminal actions, like trespassing, are integral to the enterprise. But the youth who take part in Urban Free Flow are not criminals.

I first learned about Urban Free Flow, also known as Parkour, from a musician friend whose 21-year-old son is a Parkour enthusiast in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. The practice involves arbitrarily picking two points on a city map, and then going from Point A to Point B using the most direct route possible. The route, of course, is usually anything but direct, because Parkour is practiced in highly built-up urban environments. Moving from A to B requires climbing, jumping, straddling, running, and pulling up. Climbing over handrails, park benches, walls, fences, roofs, trees, and even houses is part of the game. There is a series of moves associated with Parkour and a specialized set of terms and jargon (“grunt” or “newbie” refers to someone new to Parkour while “slam” means to fail in the execution of a particular technique).

The practice began in France—parcours du combatant has become “Parkour”—and has spread to North America and other countries. Parkour enthusiasts admit the practice is not legal, as trespassing is often involved, but they insist it isn’t “officially illegal” either. Thus, Parkour involves two inherent risks: physical injury and conflict with the law. These are precisely the two things that make my friend anxious about her son’s involvement in Parkour. But she still applauds the practice. Why?

My friend sees Parkour as a highly physical, intellectually challenging pursuit. She says on the best “runs”, her son experiences a sense of oneness—a feeling of “flow” as he moves through the natural and built environments. This is the same sense of flow associated with involvement in artistic practices or in spiritual experiences as described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. ( 13 ) My friend also says Parkour has given her son and his peers new ways of balancing competing desires, of understanding the need for social and legal constraints, of thinking about how the urban landscape was created and is connected, and of developing strategies for overcoming physical and psychological obstacles. She says Parkour helps her son negotiate in volatile situations, for he must speak convincingly and calmly with security guards and police officers unfamiliar with Parkour. I find the activity fascinating—a heady mix of play, exploration, learning, art, architecture and crime—and, as the Parkour enthusiasts say, not “officially illegal”.

So if Parkour is not crime, is it play? Or art? And what about graffiti? While I understand defacing public buildings is not something to be celebrated, some of the great expanses of concrete in large urban centers have certainly been improved by the graffiti they have invited. And there have been countless art exhibitions dedicated to the celebration of graffiti artists and their work. The way we frame ( 14 ) these activities will “trigger either pictures of self-absorbed, potentially violent, amoral teenagers or inexperienced junior adults experimenting with identity in order to assume their role in the community”. ( 15 ) Interesting choices.

American professor Mary Rose O’Reilley wrote a book called The Peaceable Classroom. In that book, she returns time and again to whether university English courses can be taught so that people might stop killing each other. ( 16 ) This question was first posed to her when she was a graduate student of Professor Ihab Hassan at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She describes how she and her peers, upon hearing the question, shuffled their feet and wondered if their professor was kidding or whether they had heard wrong. But they did not hear wrong. For O’Reilley, the question became an enduring one. Through a complex weave of anecdote and analysis, O’Reilley concludes if educational experiences are to be relevant and oriented to nonviolence, then they must acknowledge the inner life of students. She distrusts “any pedagogy that does not begin in the personal … and does not conclude in the communal”. ( 17 ) O’Reilley’s standards for schooling are high. In contrast to most experiences of schooling - experiences she describes as “endless torture by exquisite boredom” ( 18 ) - O’Reilley says we should expect nothing less of schooling than Augustine’s description of his rhetoric class, where students laughed and talked, read books together, disagreed without ill feeling, and otherwise kindled fires to make a community. ( 19 ) O’Reilley also argues that most human problems are architectural problems: the cultural agenda of education can be read like a text from the classrooms students find themselves in. As she so provocatively writes, “the arrangement of our classrooms should tell us, if we do not consciously know, what horizon we have set for the next generation”. ( 20 )

Continued on page 4.

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