Lord Foster (Norman to friends) has designed the most expensive school in the United Kingdom (£46.4 million) and possibly one of the largest: the Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough. But despite all this, the most striking feature of the center is that it lacks a playground. Students will enjoy a 30-minute lunch break, as well as breaks during class hours, and will be able to drink water during classes. They can also go to the bathroom without having to raise their hand…
The head of the center, Alan McMurdo, justifies the decision not to build a playground in statements to the BBC in this way: “This is a huge investment of public money and I think what the public demands is maximum learning. People realize that younger children can play in their free time and in their local communities.”
Leaving aside that the use of public spaces is increasingly restricted for children, making it quite complicated to “play […] in their local communities,” it seems that the main reason for suppressing the playground in the new design is ‘efficiency.’ Let’s hear some more arguments that Mr. McMurdo offers to the Daily Mail: “Students will not need to let off steam because they will not be bored” and on the other hand “Studies show that if children are focused in classes throughout the day, their performance improves.” It is clear that the first argument is based on a ‘bold’ assumption to say the least, and the second… However, another much more palpable argument is that “For a school of this size, the playground would have to have been huge, something practically uncontrollable. We have suppressed an uncontrollable space to prevent bullying and absenteeism.” A preventive measure in the purest ‘war on terror’ style. It is clear that a playground like this becomes a space that lends itself excessively to indeterminacy, which cannot be easily controlled and optimized according to the school’s instruction production standards.
But it goes further: “Those responsible for the center think that students should be treated like employees of a company and that they do not need ‘unstructured’ time to play and kick a ball, because [again] their ‘learning experience’ will not be boring,” according to journalist Daniel Bates also in the Daily Mail. It is clear that even company workers have, by law, the right to breaks, but beyond this it seems that educational models in relation to the production of labor power and forms of governance are once again at stake.
The Thomas Deacon Academy does not propose to suppress chance encounters, informal conversations, and the establishment of social relationships among its students; in fact, the academy’s slogan mentions that its educational spaces are “flexible,” which is why it maintains the informal 30-minute lunch break and why it enables relatively open and comfortable spaces, because suppressing this would go against post-Fordist production models based on the circulation of information. But it does intend to limit and direct the flow of these social relations and acts of communication between students/employees, so that those (social relations, affections, speech…) ‘get to work’ for the educational/productive system.
An ambiguous example of the latter is the Fuji Kindergarten school designed in Tokyo by the architects Takaharu and Yui Tezuka, who placed a large oval courtyard in the center of the school, surrounding it with classrooms, closed by a curtain wall that extends continuously around that large indeterminate space. They also turned the roof of the building into a kind of ‘racetrack’ in which the skylights of the classrooms serve as furniture without specific use that children effectively use to play, and even more, the track-roof communicates with the schoolyard not only by stairs but also with a slide (rollo Carsten Höller). Everything in the Fuji Kindergarten is aimed at stimulating the creativity of children, but perhaps the pertinent question is once again, creativity for what?
