A geographer attached to an educational sciences laboratory, Pascal Clerc has been working on learning spaces for over ten years. He is particularly interested in the organization of classrooms, but also in playgrounds and open-air schools.

Entitled Emancipate or Control? Students and School in the 21st Century , his essay published on August 28, 2024 by Autrement, questions the functioning of schools today, and the way in which the institution tends to compartmentalize and lock up rather than liberate and open up to different horizons and environments. Excerpt.

As usual, I came early. Passing by the “common room”, where students and teachers meet, to exchange with each other, has almost become a ritual. This time of “floating observation” is an important moment of this field work, of all field work, an interstice, almost nothing, from which sometimes the essential emerges. This will be the case again today. The Lycée de la Nouvelle Chance in Cergy is an oh-so-valuable reconnection structure installed in a traditional school establishment. As is often the case, I work on learning spaces and this link, non-deterministic, but which always seems enlightening to me, between pedagogical practices, human relations, spatial forms and the spatialities of the actors.

At this time of day, the common room is almost empty; some students are tapping away on their smartphones, others are chatting quietly. One of them recognizes me, he has already seen me in his class. He starts a conversation, he is curious and wants to know more about the strange geographer that I am in his eyes. He is interested in my research subject. One question preoccupies him: why in a world where everything changes – cars, telephones, computers… – do schools and classrooms remain as they were in the past?

It would certainly be necessary to qualify, to take into account technical developments and the veneer of modern times, but overall his question is based on an observation that holds. Today’s establishments retain the structure of those of the end of the 19th ^century  around the class system. The school form continues to organize them as heterotopic spaces of separation and transmission. This question of change or permanence is all the more relevant as strong tensions appear between the school form and an educational context in profound transformation.

This model has met political and educational expectations, but the aims of education have been largely disrupted and in a rapidly changing world, new skills need to be acquired by students “beyond traditional academic content”, as UNESCO writes . In addition, the current digital revolution requires us to rethink the “places” of knowledge that have become plural and multi-localized, as well as the methods of acquisition that can no longer be achieved through the teacher alone.

The curious student has put his finger on a crucial issue that concerns most educational systems: the school of the school form, progressively developed from the 16th ^century  and structured spatially by multiple forms of separation, resists the changes in the world even though educational issues have been considerably renewed. Why?

Like a besieged citadel, this school may even be reinforcing what made it unique. The delimitation and control mechanisms are becoming more rigid and, combined with assimilationist logic, are part of an even more pronounced project of separation from the common world. A largely illusory project since, at the same time, digital technologies are opening schools to all winds; digital technologies that are also powerful means of control. And this discordance may provide a possible explanation.

Schools are a reflection of our fears and our reactions to change; openness generates withdrawal, circulation produces barriers, crossbreeding a quest for differentiation and singular identities. The school appears as a metonymic figure of globalization, this process with seemingly contradictory logics that combines networking and circulation across the entire planet with identity resurgences and a strengthening of borders.

Beyond the fears that make the school a fortress, I have other explanatory avenues for the curious student. The force of habit and the fact that we have never known anything else have contributed to naturalizing the school form, and teaching, as the only means of instructing and educating. Through laziness and intellectual conformity, we have a collective difficulty in imagining that the pedagogical relationship can – on a large scale – be organized differently and in other spaces.

We can also highlight processes of spatial inertia. In France, we have a stock of school buildings that are sometimes old but solidly built (for the oldest ones in particular) that it would be a shame to destroy but which are difficult to adapt to a pedagogical relationship based on learning. The current organization of schools with its alignments and stacking of classrooms should be largely reviewed to create plural spaces adapted to the different learning methods: individual work, group work, debates, conferences, experiments, etc.

Finally, and this is not nothing, significant changes would require rethinking the teaching profession, even more so reinventing it around the support of learning in which transmission would be only one facet of the profession. And there is strong resistance to this development, as if it were likely to delegitimize a profession built around the mastery of knowledge.

Yet this other way of conceiving the teaching function with a pedagogical relationship based on learning already exists and has for a long time. From pedagogues like Pestalozzi, Freinet or Decroly to contemporary thinkers on education, including all those who, on a daily basis and in their classrooms, constantly reinvent pedagogical practices, the school form is constantly being undermined, and it works. Why then retreat into transmission, into the simultaneous method, into class groups that in classrooms and during class hours listen, or not, to a teacher giving class? Why constantly return to the “fundamentals”, assessments/grading, school uniforms, sanctuarization, etc.? Because all this is part of a pedagogy of control, because a student must be supervised, because autonomy and emancipation are in reality projects that are frightening. […]

With the resistance of the school form and the real or symbolic barriers that close schools, another resistance is then played out, political, with regard to an education that would be truly emancipatory. The school form is political, like a model that would be its antithesis and that would also be, according to other modalities, closely linked to the material and spatial forms of educational establishments. Because space, social production, is political; and always, explicitly or not, linked to a project of society.

Everything makes sense with the spatialities of the school form: the difficulties of crossing, the separative logics, the paradoxical relationship with the surroundings of the school, the fear of the outside, the production of hard borders, the inability to think about networks. The resistances to changes are those of a society that instrumentalizes the school as a means of controlling individuals. We make it the place of social reproduction despite the permanent discourses on the fight against inequalities, the place of production of future “compliant” adults within a normalizing institution that does not accept diversity in the collective and the autonomy of each individual.

<em>Author Bio: Pascal Clerc is a University Professor of Geography at CY Cergy Paris University