No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Building the Queenslander: the contribution of school architecture to the formation of the child
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2016
Extract
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.
- Type
- Discipline and Education
- Information
- Queensland Review , Volume 3 , Issue 2: Volume 3 Special Issue 02 (Young in a Warm Climate) - July 1996 Editor: Lynetter Finch , July 1996 , pp. 86 - 99
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press
References
Endnotes
This paper was made possible with the assistance of a small grant from the School of Cultural and Policy Studies, QUT.Google Scholar
1. 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).Google Scholar
2. Roth, A., A New School Building, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966).Google Scholar
3. For more on this, see Ian Hunter, Culture and Government: the Emergence of Literary Education, (London: Macmillan, 1988).Google Scholar
4. Jones, K., and Williamson, K., “The birth of the schoolroom: a study of the transformation of the discursive conditions of English popular education in the first half of the nineteenth century”, Ideology and Consciousness, Vol VI (1979): 59–110.Google Scholar
5. 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).Google Scholar
6. 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).Google Scholar
7. Barnard's writings were originally published in the 1840s in the USA as a school building manual and have been edited by J. McClintock and R. McClintock, Henry Barnard's “School Architecture”, (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970).Google Scholar
8. The School House, its Architecture, External and Internal Arrangements, with Initial Papers on Gymnastics, the Use of Apparatus, School Discipline, Methods of Teaching, etc., etc., (foronto: Department of Public Instruction for Upper Canada, 1857).Google Scholar
9. Edward, Robert Robson, School Architecture, (New York: Humanities Press, 1972). For an assessment of Robson's impact on Australian school architecture, see L. Burchell, Victorian Schools: a Study in Colonial Government Architecture 18371900, (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
10. Clay, Sir Felix, Modern School Buildings: Elementary and Secondary, 3rd ed (London: Batsford, 1929).Google Scholar
11. 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).Google Scholar
12. Clay, Modern School Buildings.Google Scholar
13. See Robson, School Architecture, who provides statistics on the production of poisonous air in a classroom: calculated to be 27 cubic feet per hour!Google Scholar
14. Clay, Modern School Buildings.Google Scholar
15. See A. Forty, “The modern hospital in England and France: the social and medical uses of architecture” in Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment, ed. A.D. King (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp.61–93.Google Scholar
16. Clay, Modern School Buildings, cites the example of the first open air school in Charlottenburg, in Germany, which was established in 1904.Google Scholar
17. A typical instance of these intersecting discourses is M. Macmillan, “London's children: how to feed them and how not to feed them” in Education, the Child and Society, ed. W. van der Eyken (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).Google Scholar
18. Robson, School Architecture.Google Scholar
19. Evans, K., “The physical form of the school”, British Journal of Educational Studies XXVII, 1, February (1979): 9–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20. See Hyams, B.K. and Bessant, B., Schools for the People: an Introduction to the History of State Education in Australia (Camberwell: Longman, 1972).Google Scholar
21. Report of the Inspector-General of Schools, Thirtieth Report of the Secretary for Public InstlUctionfor the Year 1905 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1906); Report of the Inspector-General of Schools, Thirty-third Report of the Secretary for Public Instruction for the Year 1908 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1909).Google Scholar
22. Clarke, E., Provisional Schools in Queensland: a Brief History (Brisbane: Department of Education, n.d).Google Scholar
23. “New School Buildings”, Telegraph, September 9, 1913.Google Scholar
24. Queensland Teachers Journal XXXII 1, 23 April (1926).Google Scholar
25. For a good example of such encomium, see an article on the opening of Wooloowin State School in Queensland Education Journal, 1 October (1914).Google Scholar
26. “Windsor State School”, Brisbane Courier, 7 August 1916.Google Scholar
27. “Address to Teachers' Conference”, Brisbane Courier, 13 January 1914.Google Scholar
28. Elkington, J.S.C., “School hygiene”, Education Office Gazette, December (1910).Google Scholar
29. “Lectures on school hygiene and personal hygiene”, Education Office Gazette, July (1911).Google Scholar
30. Circular 8 December, 1906, “Register of Circulars, 1906–1917”, A/26071, QSA.Google Scholar
31. Elkington, “School hygiene”.Google Scholar
32. See relevant sections of The State Education Acts, 1875–1912 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1934).Google Scholar
33. Thirty-fourth Report of the Secretary for Public Instruction for the Year 1909 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1910).Google Scholar
34. Thirty-ninth Report of the Secretary for Public Instruction for the Year 1914 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1915).Google Scholar
35. Thirty-ninth Report ofthe Secretary for Public Instruction for the Year 1914.Google Scholar
36. Forty-first Report ofthe Secretaryfor Public Instructionfor the Year 1916 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1917).Google Scholar
37. The State Education Acts, 1875–1912.Google Scholar
38. “Agricultural Section”, Educational Office Gazette April, (1918): 133–137.Google Scholar
39. Fifty-jirst Report of the Secretary for Public Instruction for the Year 1926 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1927); Thirty-third Report of the Secretary for Public Instruction for the Year 1926 (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1908).Google Scholar
40. See Register of Circulars, December 1915, A/26071, QSA.Google Scholar
41. 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.Google Scholar
42. “Papers re the proposed substitution of paper for slates in State Schools, the scheme for supplying of pictures to schools, school children in dairying districts, and the War and education, 1906–1916”, A/15755, QSA.Google Scholar