THE WORLD OF SCHOOL AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY. STRUCTURE AND ARCHITECTURE, SPACE AND TIME.
Let's start with something relatively innocuous, material, and temporal.
For the lack of better proposals and based on historical tradition, the compulsory government-run school was briskly built on the model described as early as the 17th century by John Amos Comenius. The structure he invented has confidently proven its fool-resistance for over a hundred years – it held through as it was erected, and no winds, fashionable fads or innovations could shake it and, it seems, will not be able to do it for a long time.
Comenius' key metaphor pictured school as a garden where the child is a plant and the teacher is a gardener. Each plant is provided with temperatures, watering, and care (hilling up, covering) as needed. Some ripen earlier, others later, etc. Following the ways and laws of nature make for good teaching. This sweet picture is especially dear to those who consider schooling to be the greatest blessing in human history. Over the past hundred years, however, people's ideas about effective gardening have changed dramatically, and this metaphor is taking on some new aspects: fertilizers, pesticides, GMOs, hydroponics, square watermelons and tomatoes, weed, and excess shoot removal.
From all of Comenius' rich and diverse philosophical and pedagogical heritage, the state school decisively plucked out and appropriated only the organizational structure he proposed for a system aimed at educating everyone.
Originally mixed-age elementary schools, bringing together all children aged seven to eleven who came to learn, quickly stratified by age with the introduction of compulsory education, using calendar/biological age as the sole basis for dividing students into somewhat manageable groups. Schools that retained mixed-age student groups (Jena Plan, Montessori, Waldorf) were pushed to the periphery of public education or were never included in it at all, remaining private institutions almost everywhere.
Class sizes grew rapidly as more and more students entered the system. The school day became longer, starting earlier and ending later in accordance with working conditions in factories and offices where the students' parents worked. As the number of students grew, the school increasingly leaned towards maintaining order by police-bureaucratic methods: whistles in the hallways, strict attendance tracking, 4-5 minutes to run between classes, a physical pass system (to the bathroom, nurse, other teacher, etc.).
Opponents of such school organization immediately came up with the prison metaphor: an undeserved sentence of up to 13 years, life by the bell, the same faces around day after day, no choice of activities, meaningless effort, work and achievement - after all, you couldn't get out early anyway, even on parole; lack of rights; hazing and bullying of the worst kinds. The school building in any city of the world can be recognized from a mile away - it looks like a prison. But even this metaphor is incomplete - in a real prison, at least they don't force you to memorize books written by the jailers.
The school building first grew additional rooms. Then specialization began, accompanied by the emerging technologies: science labs emerged, foreign language labs (who remembers them today?!), computer labs (already disappearing, because almost every student has had their own or school-issued tablet or laptop), vocational workshops (gone with the introduction of universal secondary education), and so on. Companies producing school furniture and equipment multiplied. To tie a school or school district to themselves for many years, they did everything possible to ensure that their equipment was not compatible or combinable with similar equipment from their competitors.
Where the allotted school grounds allowed, playgrounds and sports facilities also emerged and multiplied: soccer fields, volleyball and basketball courts, tennis courts, swimming pools, etc. All of this was very expensive, so schools usually shared them, which often created considerable logistical difficulties.
School furniture changed: from long tables and benches to double desks, then to individual desks, from them to individual tables and chairs. Today in elementary school trapezoid tables, floor mats, and bean bags in the corners are not uncommon. The chalkboard went its own evolutionary path from a piece of plywood painted black that was written on with chalk, to a computerized huge touchscreen that responds to the lightest touch of a teacher's or student's finger. Textbooks also went their own path over a hundred years: from small black-and-white booklets on poor paper with few illustrations to huge, heavy, colorful tomes with piles of additional materials for both teachers and students, and finally, they moved entirely online, where you can no longer thumb through them.
School libraries, once the central link in the school construct that opened the path to reading for millions of children, have been quietly fading into online oblivion.
There is no data on how all this material evolution affected the quality of our education and that of our children. I'm afraid it didn't at all. Neither the transition from pencils to fountain pens, from there to mechanical pencils, from there to ballpoint pens, from there to keyboards; nor the introduction of school uniforms, their successive simplification, and then abolition (in some places they still remain today); nor hanging portraits of scientists and writers on classroom walls, student works or printed posters with basic rules of the native language, physical or chemical formulas, classroom conduct rules, had any influence.
Knowledgeable and experienced people can say a lot about a particular school just by crossing its threshold. A few indicators give them all the necessary clues – the level of noise and cleanliness in the hallways, the smell of the cafeteria and the state of the school bathrooms.
As you all know, time in school is measured by academic years, quarters/semesters/trimesters, vacations, the number of lessons per day and their duration, and therefore by bells.
The length of the school year in different countries and even in different regions/states of one large country depends mostly on bureaucratic decisions, and traditions, of course. These decisions have no relation to the educational needs of students, or to the effectiveness of education/learning in general. If they did, the idea of moving to a four-day school week would not have emerged simultaneously in very different countries. The school year can last from 160 to 220 school days. There is no data showing a dependence of the quality of education (learning outcomes) on the length of the school year.
The arrival of vacations is also in no way connected to the needs of the educational process: well, let's say the children have been working intensively for so many days, a break for a week or two is well deserved. Vacations are usually tied to national/state holidays, i.e. legal parental days off. Vacations during the school year are wonderful in that the schools do close for that time. But it’s never this simple with summer vacation: those who have fallen behind are supposedly catching up on whatever they've missed, older students prepare for entrance exams/tests for the next levels of education. Just as with the length of the school year, there is no data showing the comparative effectiveness of different vacation models.
The length of the school day varies from four to nine hours, the number of lessons per day from four to eight, and the duration of lessons by country and level of education is thirty to ninety minutes. And again, sorry, but no data.... (please continue yourself).
The question of how many subjects should be in the school curriculum in different years of study and how much time each subject deserves in the school schedule is as eternal as the school itself. There is an answer to it in each school/country every year, and reasons are always given for it. But these answers never have any clear, that is, scientifically justified, relation to the interests and needs of students. And the long-term results of these decisions are well known to everyone. For example, we teach children mathematics every day for ten to 14 years, and...?! Or the native language - roughly the same, and...? Physics or chemistry, for example, are taught in America for one year, and in Russia for four and five, and...? It seems that an unconditional consensus on the set of subjects exists only in relation to the native language and mathematics, but there is no such consensus in the world on the total time required to master them.
A description of the world of things at the beginning of the 21st century would be incomplete without at least mentioning the internet as a whole, and Google and other search engines in particular, as well as social networks. All of these affect our way of life, our ideas about education, and relationships between people at home, at work, and at school every day.
And only the school "timekeeper" – the bell signaling the start and end of class – having taken its quite innocuous path over these hundred years from a little bell in the hands of the school head teacher, to an electric bell operated manually, to ringing from corridor speakers, to the pleasant melodies coming at the appointed time to the same speakers through a computer system today - still marks the moments of engaging our children in their "work” and disengaging them from it.