Building the Queenslander
The Contribution of School Architecture to the Formation of the Child
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600006462Keywords:
Material practices of school, visions of childhood and pedagogy, educational architectureAbstract
The material practices of school, as they relate to the child, have not figured prominently in the repertoire of educational inquiry. They have been examined only in so far that their understanding might result in optimising the conditions of learning or provide systematic explanations as to why school processes are inadequate. Any idea that the practices themselves might encode and instantiate visions of childhood and pedagogy contingent on broader schemes of social planning and ideas of the public good, does not appear to have entered the purview of those writing about education. Under the impact of the nouvelle histoire of Philippe Ariès and Michel Foucault, this situation is being redressed and there is an evolving body of literature devoted to the genealogy of classroom practice, with a specific focus on its origins and underpinning logics. Of special significance to such practice is the venue in which it takes place, namely, the school, which is a specialised form of architecture, housing a range of furnishings and facilities designed to enhance the positions of teacher and child in such a way as to advance the cause of education.
References
This paper was made possible with the assistance of a small grant from the School of Cultural and Policy Studies, QUT.
This tradition has, as its specific focus, the practices of everyday life as they relate to such issues as death and sexuality. Ariès' major work, and the one which singlehandedly, has stimulated an interest in childhood is Centuries of Childhood: a Social History of Family Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962). Among Foucault's writings, of particular relevance is Discipline and Punish : the Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) the perspective proffered by these authors is Carmen Luke's Pedagogy, Printing and Protestantism: the Discourse on Childhood, (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1989); David Hamilton's Towards a Theory of Schooling, (London: Falmer Press, 1989); and James Donald's Sentimental Education: Schooling, Popular Culture and the Regulation of Liberty, (London: Verso, 1992).
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The design for the panopticon was proposed for a prison by Jeremy Bentham, following a visit to a factory in Russia. See R. Evans, “Bentham's ‘panopticon’”, Architectural Association Quarterly, Spring (1977). It forms the centrepiece of Foucault's argument in Discipline and Punish. In relation to the railway station, see J. Richards and J. M. MacKenzie, The Railway Station: a Social History (London: Oxford University Press, 1986).
The architectural story of this development in Australia has yet to be told, at least with the same degree of detail as has occurred in UK, with the chronicling of the school architecture developments in Hertfordshire (a precursor of the school design exported to Australia). See M. Seaborne and R. Rowe, The English School: its Architecture and Organisation, Vol. II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); S. Maclure, Educational Developments and School Buildings : Aspects of Public Policy 1945–73 (Harlow: Longman, 1984); A. Saint, Towards a Social Architecture: the Role of School Building in Post-war England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
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For a discussion of Pugin's ideas, see Robert Macleod, Style and Society: Architectural Ideology in Britain 1835–1934 (London: RIBA, 1971). In fact several of Pugin's acolytes worked in Queensland, e.g. R. G. Suter, Benjamin Backhouse who designed Ipswich Grammar School and the architect of Brisbane Grammar, James Colishaw. P. Barnett, Images of a School: Art and Architecture as Symbolic of Ideals at Brisbane Grammar School (Brisbane: Brisbane Grammar School, 1989); D. Watson, “A new curriculum in building construction: the origins of outside cladding”, History of Queensland Education Society 4, 3, (1991).
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Thirty-fourth report of the secretary for public instruction for the year 1926 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1909). In many respects these paintings were to act as the visual equivalents of the Queensland Readers, inculcating “self-help” philosophy. See Sandra Taylor's “The Queensland school reader: textual constructions of childhood in 1930s and 1940s classrooms” in this volume.
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