Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
Do Schools Have to Be Boring?
By Alison Lurie
BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ARTICLE
School
by Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor
London: Reaktion, 208 pp., $27.00 (paper; distributed in the US by University of Chicago Press)
The Open Classroom: A Practical Guide to a New Way of Teaching
by Herbert R. Kohl
New York Review, 116 pp. (1969)
Social Design: Creating Buildings with People in Mind
by Robert Sommer
Prentice-Hall, 198 pp. (1983)
Big Box Reuse
by Julia Christensen
MIT Press, 231 pp., $29.95
Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory
by Jonathan Zimmerman
Yale University Press, 217 pp. (to be published in June 2009)
Children's Spaces
edited by Mark Dudek
Elsevier/Architectural Press, 281 pp., $57.95 (paper)
Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children
by David Harsanyi
Broadway, 291 pp., $24.95
Our view of what childhood is has always influenced how children are educated and what schools look like. Until the mid-eighteenth century boys and girls were often seen as miniature adults, as uncivilized imps of Satan, or, with John Locke, as blank sheets of paper on which a parent or teacher could inscribe knowledge and morality. The Romantic movement of the late eighteenth century cast the child as a Wordsworthian innocent, naturally good and eager to learn; it also had important and lasting, though far from universal, effects on the physical form of schools.
Review, 4393 words
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