Schools as architecture for newcomers and strangers: The perfect school as public school?

Teachers College Record

Volumn 112, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 533-555

  Masschelein, J A N ^a   Simons, Maarten ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

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EID: 77950660452     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: 14679620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Hannah Arendt The Crisis in Education" (1958), in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 186.
2. See Nikolas Rose, The Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
3. Jan Masschelein, The Discourse of the Learning Society and the Loss of Childhood." Journal of Philosophy of Education 35, no.1 (2001): 1-20;
4. Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, "An Adequate Education for a Globalized World? A Note on the Immunization of Being-Together," Journal of Philosophy of Education 36, no.4 (2002): 565-584
5. Arendt "Crisis," 177.
6. Ibid., 192-193
7. Ibid., 192.
8. Hannah Arendt The Human Condition (London/Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958/1989), 6.
9. See Marcel Gauchet La Démocratie contre elle-même (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
10. Colin Gordon, "Governmental Rationality. An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentatity, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 44.
11. Rose, The Powers of Freedom, 162.
12. See Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein, "Our 'Will to Learn' and the Assemblage of a Learning Apparatus," in Foucault and Adult Education, ed. Andreas Fejes and Kathy Nicoll (London: Roudedge, 2008), 48-60.
13. Wim Cuyvers, Exhibition Catalogue (Antwerp, Belgium: de Singel, 1975);
14. Wim Cuyvers, Text about Text (The Hague, The Nedierlands: Stroom/Vborkamer, 2005);
15. see also the presentation of his work in Maarten Van Den Driessche, The Journey of the Children," Oase: Journal for Architecture 72 (2007):72-96, and Maarten Van Den Driessche and Bart Verschaffel, eds., De school als ontwerpopgave. Schoolarchitectuur in Vlaanderen 1995-2005 [The School as Design Project School Architecture in Flanders 1995-2005] (Brussels, Belgium: A&TS Books, 2006).
16. Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, eds., Europa 2006. E-ducatieve berichten uit niemandsland [Europa 2006. E-ducational Reports from No-Man's Land] (Leuven, Belgium: ACCO, 2006).
17. Arendt "Crisis," 189.
18. This Logos, of course, can be thought of in different ways as culture, (communicative) reason, law, social order, learning competency. . .
19. It is important to stress that this "Here we speak Dutch or English" is not be confused with this other sentence that according to Arendt reveals the responsibility of the teacher: This is our world" (Arendt "Crisis," 189). The latter implies that the teacher assumes responsibility for the world and accepts it as it is (and Arendt states presumptuously that the one who refuses this responsibility "should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them" (189), making it present and presenting it to the newcomers (i.e., making it public), allowing, thus, that it become truly common (i.e., also possibly altered). Therefore, in our idea, This is our world" is related radier to the second line of thought-and in fact points at it-which we will discuss furuier on.
20. See Maarten Simons, The school in de ban van het leven: een cartografie van het moderne en actuele onderwijsdispositief" [The School in the "Ban" of Life: A Cartography of the Modern and Current School Apparatus] (Ph.D. dissertation, K. University Leuven, 2004).
21. Here again, we are not claiming that this is exacdy the position of Arendt (since she is, for example, in favor of a certain "darkness," that is, absence of the public glare, in order to allow for development), but we are trying to elaborate one particular line of dunking about the public meaning of the school-a line of dunking that is, according to us, also present in Arendt's essay.
22. Ivan Illich indicated years ago how schools divide any society into two realms that could be characterized in different ways: civilized and noncivilized, academic/pedagogic and not academic/pedagogic. He claimed, relying on Durkheim, that this divide is in essence a religious operation subdividing the world "into tilings and times and persons that are sacred and others that as a consequence are profane"; Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 31.
23. See Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2005).
24. English translation: Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
25. We take up diese ideas of Agamben in a different way dian the one exposed by Lewis in his analysis of the school as exceptional space (that is, as camp);
26. Tyson Lewis, The School as an Exceptional Space: Rethinking Education from the Perspective of the Biopedagogical," Educational Theory 56, no. 2 (2006) 159-176 Here we are not so much interested in the analysis of actual school functioning as we are in exploring (not the ideal but) the perfect school architecture, which probably could be seen as an exceptional space in a different way: not as a camp, but as a sanctuary (see furuier).
27. See Simons, "De school in de ban van het leven" and Giorgio Agamben, Idée de la prose (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1998), 59-61;
28. English translation: Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).
29. Agamben, Idée de la prose, 61.
30. Simons, "De school in de ban van het leven," 124-25;
31. Masschelein and Simons, eds., Europa 2006,10-12.
32. Franz Kafka, "Voor de wet" (Before the law) in Franz Kafka: Verzameld Werk (Collected Works) (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 2002), 785-787
33. See also Masschelein and Simons, eds., Europa 2006, 10-12;
34. Simons, "De school in de ban van het leven," 378, 288.
35. Giorgio Agamben, De sauvereine macht en het naakte leven (Sovereignty and Bare Life) (Amsterdam: Boom/Parrèsia, 2002), 63-64.
36. Aldiough this might sound in one way un-Arendtian, in another way, it takes up her strong and repeated statement that education "must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition" (Arendt "Crisis," 195). Precisely this last sentence is very often forgotten or too easily overlooked in many comments.
37. Arendt "Crisis," 174.
38. Hannah Arendt "What Is Authority?" (1958), in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 141.
39. Arendt, "Crisis," 195.
40. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt trans. Harry Zohn (London: Collins/Fontana Books, 1973), and especially Arendt's introduction.
41. Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind (San Diego/New York/London: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 212.
42. The Life of the Mind, 1978, 212, Ibid..
43. Arendt introduction to Benjamin, Illuminations, 42. In her beautiful and sympathetic introduction, Arendt says that Benjamin's basic approach was "not to investigate the utilitarian or communicative functions of linguistic creations, but to understand diem in their crystallized and thus ultimately fragmentary form as intention-less and non-communicative utterances of a 'world essence.'. . . What guides this dunking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that . . . what once was alive . . . survives in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements" (50-51 ). In a certain way, one could think about the "perfect school" as something that is crystallized as a kind of pearl.
44. Van Den Driessche, The Journey of the Children," 81-82.
45. Here we differ from the interpretation of Cuyvers's work by Van den Driessche, who still looks at the school he designed as primarily an "intermethate" space or a space-inbetween the home and the world, that is, a space of introduction (Van Den Driessche, The Journey of the Children," 84).
46. Tijl Vanmeirhaeghe, "De school ab apparaat Een kleine geschiedenis van het Belgische schooltraktaat" [The School as Apparatus: A Litde History of the Belgian School Trac ta tus], in De school als ontwerpopgave, 64-87.
47. See Giorgio Agamben, Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 1993).
48. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces ( 1967)," Diacritics (Spring 1986): 22-27.