Paul Horton: Charter School Design: The New Streamlining
Guest post by Paul Horton.
Do a simple online search of "charter school design" and see what pops up. While some of the images you might see might be urban warehouse and public school gut "rehabs," most of the images are straight out of the "Jetsons," down to the furniture.
Now contrast the images of Carl Schurz High School (search Google images to see) in Chicago with the charter school images. Schurz High School, like many public high schools built in the early twentieth century, was built to last by craftsmen. It represents a massive investment in public education. It is based on Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of "organic" architecture that expresses John Dewey's idea of education as an organic endeavor: the idea of the school as a community center that is a beehive for the construction of Democracy. In this context, Democracy is about relationships and the school is comprehensive: it is the place where kids and adults come together to acquire skills and knowledge: a hybrid of the public school and Hull House, where John Dewey spent a lot of time thinking about how to reconstruct public education as community education.
Charters are designed to do something much more limited in scope. Both charter design and early twentieth century public school design represent an aspirational utopianism. But they differ in that they represent different images of American Progressive philosophy.
To my mind, Schurz High very clearly represents a scale up of Dewey's organic model of