We are looking for a variety of tools. We are looking for tools that are going to be worked in real time and slow time, the way I learned. We are looking for tools that once you establish a proper base, are going to permit students to take advantage of that base and learn, in fast time, a hell of a lot more than I and those of my age were able to do in the same amount of time.

If these tools are going to be properly calibrated and sequenced, you’re going to have a variety of things done in each subject area by module. For example, let’s imagine that we have a social studies class, say American History where you typically studied the Civil War. We currently do it from documents that have been copied from documents, which have been copied from the last textbook, etc.

Imagine that the Smithsonian finds all of the papers from the Civil War period from New York, Boston, Richmond and Atlanta and a teacher could establish project teams of four students where each team has a student acting as a resident of those cities. (Port Hueneme would have add Philadelphia and Birmingham because it’s set up in teams of six.) The students read from original sources what was recorded and they have to give a combined report of every fifth period or every sixth period.

They might take turns in reporting so that part of their time is giving reports. The rest of their time is in debating and discussing the different ways that the different residents of those cities viewed the events of the war, working from original material.

That particular modular block of work is based again in forces of information that can be made available. I am sure that in my own mind that if we structured this subject this way, it would be a better way to study Civil War history, than the way that I studied it. Students would learn more and get a lot more out of it.

If each different subject area has its nuances that are accommodated, and so your tools are changing, the curriculum is changing and the educational modules that you use are changing, the rate of change of what is taking place within the classroom is moving very quickly.

If the use of computers or laptops becomes universal, what you’ve established is a mass market that has enough uniformity where the people who develop educational materials for that Port Hueneme school or for another specific school can again begin to develop educational materials for the entire country. That provides a liberating element that would make it possible to design and perfect and improve educational tools.

“Flexibility in schools happens in three different ways. One is the demountable partition … This is not going to support the kind of flexibility for the changes that I am talking about.”

If this ferment is going on, in terms of the curriculum materials, if we begin to reach a plateau in terms of the evolution that we been going through the last ten years, with regard to information technology so that there certain normative elements that people can relate to, this would be the beginning of a point in time where changes will come very quickly.

Flexibility in schools happens in three different ways. One, is the demountable partition where you move things around and major changes require major capital budgets. It is appropriate for the old way of education where changes are going to made maybe every twelve to twenty years and they are going to be implemented at one time throughout the school. This is not going to support the kind of flexibility for the changes that I am talking about.

The second way of achieving flexibility is to provide enough space within classrooms to permit multiple and different activities to occur. This is a strategy like in those large Victorian houses, where you had a lot of flexibility because the rooms were big enough. One of the things that we find however, is as I mentioned in the beginning, we’re in a period like the 1950’s again. Everybody is trying to cut back and save money.

” … we are hardwiring a single design to a single situation and ensuring that the building will obsolesce and not be worthy of providing a good learning environment over time.”

Often this results in the provision of the minimum allocation of space possible to house the current program. In these instances, we are hardwiring a single design to a single situation and ensuring that the building will obsolesce and not be worthy of providing a good learning environment over time. We must have enough space to provide flexibility where in the teachers and the students control that flexibility.

We can go one step further. We may have more than just classrooms and spaces of a uniform size. We can have spaces of varying size that can house the range of larger group activities and smaller group activities. Then as different activities need to use a different process or there is a need for a different numbers of students to work together, you can begin to flip over the use of a couple of spaces. By switching activities around into different spaces over time, we can have the opportunity of relating to particular needs even more quickly and effectively without major construction.

However, we still have to be able to have multiple activities taking place within a single classroom. As we look towards the future, one of the key criteria for the design of any school building is that the building should become a laboratory for its own evolution.

If you begin to think in terms of the rate of change that way, and we have talked of choreography, we can begin to think of the educational space as a theater where the teacher and students, the director and the actors in our analogy, can determine how they use that space so that the play of learning that goes on is appropriate to the requirements of those students, the subject that they are studying and the tools that they are using.

This means that designing a proscenium stage type of theater isn’t going to work anymore than a theater in the round. We have to be thinking of how to create the appropriate forms that are going to provide the level of flexibility that would permit us to design keeping in mind the concept of the school being a laboratory for its own evolution.

To achieve this we must have space and we must be able to service that space. And if we cut short on one of the those elements today, our schools are not going to be able to achieve the 20-year useful life that we have had with the 1950’s schools. These schools are going to have a two and a half year useful life. And that two and a half year useful life is going to result in poor student performance by any measure. And all of the things that we talk about in terms of the assessment of education are not going to make sense and we will not be properly allocating the taxpayer’s dollars.

Thank you.

© Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects
23 East 4th St., New York, NY 10003
Contact: Sean O’Donnell
212-353-0400
sean@eekarchitects.com

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