Review: The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856–2006 by Dale Allen Gyure; Das Klassenzimmer vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute / The Classroom: From the Late 19th Century until the Present Day by Thomas Müller and Romana Schneider; Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory by Jonathan Zimmerman

Abstract

Dale Allen Gyure The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856–2006 Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2011, 294 pp., 81 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9781935195191 Thomas Muller and Romana Schneider Das Klassenzimmer vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute / The Classroom: From the Late 19th Century until the Present Day Tubingen, Germany: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2011, 304 pp., 400 color and 400 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9783803033482 Jonathan Zimmerman Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory Icons of America series, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 233 pp., 13 b/w illus. $26 (cloth), ISBN 9780300123265 All of a sudden, architectural historians are thinking about schools. I hope this is evidence of a new trend to document educational landscapes, because for too long, far too long, places made for children to learn (and live and play) have received short shrift from our scholarly community. The encouraging evidence of interest includes a new history of children’s spaces in Denmark, several of open-air schools in Europe, and one study of British schools.1 In the United States, architectural historians have started to consider spaces for children, including in this journal.2 But the absence of book-length works on school design in the U.S. is puzzling, because schooling is the central experience of modern children and schools the central site where modern childhood is lived. For many reasons, the social construction of childhood changed in the nineteenth century, prompting parents to treasure children for their emotional contribution to family life and child savers to insist kids deserved to learn and play, rather than work. The transition was not easy or smooth, but as education came to be the job of every child, communities built public schools and hired architects to design many of them. Imagine the extent of this public works project, as important as any other in shaping a modern nation. Architects, some well known, others less so, designed buildings that, coupled with compulsory education, fulfilled the state’s interest in teaching children to read, write, and calculate. In the nineteenth century, this significant claim on the public purse demanded construction of hundreds of thousands of buildings in the U.S., from one-room schools in the country to grammar and high schools in cities and suburbs, and the manufacture of huge quantities of equipment, including desks. Immediately, these and other artifacts showed the cultural landscape of public education to be …