21st CENTURY SCHOOLS

Designing Schools for the 21st Century by Vincent Ciccarelli, AIA, Leed AP

Are you “old school” when it comes to the design of today’s educational
environments? That may not be a good thing. Many of today’s “new” schools bear a striking resemblance in their design to the buildings of the post World War II era.
In these schools, influenced by the concepts of mass production, students were efficiently sorted by educational level (and often gender) and organized into classrooms where they learned by rote. They sat in neat rows of desks facing a lecturer, preparing for jobs that they often kept for the rest of their lives.1 This educational paradigm starts with the assumption that a pre-determined number of students will all learn the same thing, at the same time, from the same person, in the same way, in the same place each day. (Continued)