School Environments Suck

Schools should be environments that kids love coming to. This means that learning spaces should be designed so that kids love to be there.

Design and architecture can tell you a lot about a place and the people in it. I recently visited the Google offices in Downtown Austin with some students. We were all in awe of the three restaurants, gyms, kitchens on each floor, massage studios, a dog park, and full ping pong competition courts. As we passed Googlers and watched them in their normal work environment, one of my students said, “I can tell people like being here. I mean who wouldn’t love working here? They’ve got Super Smash Bro’s.” We could all see that Google was intentionally designed for its employees to love being there. 

When was the last time someone said that about a school building? 

This is an industrial-era classroom from 1900.

Industrial era schools had a goal to create effective workers, not happy students. They emphasized conformity, repetition, rote memorization, and never allow kids to question authority. Naturally, the design of the school building supported these purposes. 

Unfortunately, classrooms have not changed since. From 1900 to 2020 classrooms have largely looked the same. This is something I call the 100-year tragedy.

I work at a school called Alpha that is rethinking learning spaces. When people walk into our building they often call it WeWork for kids. While I know no one wants to be like WeWork right now, what they are saying is that we are a school with wide-open workspaces and kids who work at their own pace. THIS is what our school looks like.

There is nothing industrial or traditional about our building. No classrooms, no principal’s office, no lockers or school assembly hall. In fact, one of our buildings is the historic La Zona Rosa building in downtown Austin.

Alpha is designed intentionally as a kid space. Kids can work anywhere in the building, can move furniture around and, when they give us feedback on the way we are using the building, we listen. Outside of a staff restroom, there are no adult-only spaces at Alpha. No teacher’s lounge or staff breakroom or staff offices. We work right alongside kids. 

As an educator, working at Alpha has stretched me and taught me to think differently about school spaces. If you are trying to design a space kids love, you have to expand your mind and think differently about what a school building should look like. 

What are your thoughts? What do you think the classroom should look like?

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I recently gave a TEDx talk at TEDx South Congress. Because this message is important to me, I wanted to make sure to share it in as many mediums as I can. I will be doing a four part article series on Linkedin to share the written version of the talk!

This is Part 2 of the 4-part series.

Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment with your thoughts. I'd love to hear what you think.