what if … schools took a page from social practice artists?

There’s a plan afoot for the local school district to purchase a building on the campus of ACT, the education testing giant that is headquartered here, and turn it into an innovation school. (Caveat: I have no idea how far along these plans are.) Years ago, I would have been excited about this. Now, I don’t think that any meaningful new school can arise directly from the old model. A school that is necessarily tied by the bureaucracy, funding structures, legalities, and institutional memory of a district is nearly destined to fail. I am also leery of ‘innovation,’ a word so coopted by business to connote profit that it’s hard to ignore it. Could such a school create some good ideas that might be shared with others? Yes. But is it where we need to put our energy — time, money, imagination, and collaborative efforts — now? No.

Schools could take a cue from the world of social practice art, where unexpected collaborations and communal experience are central. Take for example a project that occurred in 2013 at a housing project in the Bronx. “Gramsci’s Monument” was a collaboration of the artist Thomas Hirschhorn and Erik Farmer, the president of the tenants’ association. Based on the teachings of the philosopher Gramsci, the project was not a monument in the sense a large, imposing figure, but in the sense of an homage to the curiosity and rebelliousness of one philosopher’s vision. A series of structures, mainly made out of plywood and found objects, were jerry-rigged to host public, communal experiences, including philosophy lectures, poetry readings, a collective newspaper, a library, performances, radio shows, and art workshops over the course of one summer.

I can’t find anything that indicates what came out of Gramsci’s Monument — no test scores to suggest whose minds were opened to new ideas, what connections were made. But being a student of these kinds of ephemeral collaborative spaces, I am certain there were plenty.

This is more along the lines of what is needed right now for our schools: Spaces that are of and by the people who live there; schools where multigenerational learning is part of the fabric; learning environments that freely combine disciplines and don’t differentiate between high and low — because we are all beginning, I hope, to see that the so-called low skills may be what save us.

A project like this — and there are numerous other place-based installations by social practice artists (check out Rick Lowe’s Project Row House in Houston and Theaster Gates’ work in Chicago, if you’re not familiar; they’re expansive, generous, and filled with buck-the-system thinking)— are valuable examples toward what school could be. They explode the rote and the assumed and invite questions like: Why are some topics and subjects deemed valuable academic learning and others not? For instance, why does Algebra count toward a grade but the ability to lead a generous conversation with potential adversaries does not? Why does school take place in a four-walled building among people of a narrow age set? What does this model say about how we value both our elders and our children? How much say does any of us have — should any of us have — in what we learn in this place called school?

Another example from the art world harkens from a current exhibition titled “R Is for Repair” that started in Singapore and is now at the V&A in London. It is exactly what its title suggests, an examination of our culture of mass consumption that resists repairing things and opts to throw them out, to undervalue that which is frayed or torn and overvalue that which is shiny and new. How do we go from, for instance, sending a winter parka with a tear on it to Goodwill to putting a patch on it and wearing it not with a sense of having to do so out of financial need but out of pride for being among those who aren’t shortsighted and who care enough to do so?

So much of what we don’t repair is in part because we don’t know how to — we’re not taught. We’re now far enough down this road, that few of us even have living relatives with repair skills. Repair should be threaded into our education system, so that from a young age we’re teaching skills like sewing, construction, and electronics. Kids are naturally drawn to these skills; they play at them, so let’s actually intentionally teach them rather than sidelining them as cute afterthoughts that can be learned in after-school camps when the ‘real’ learning is done.

What does an ethos of repair look like? What if teaching / schooling decisions were informed by this question? Schools could actually exist in places that are themselves a site of repair. Take Open Heartland, a small local nonprofit that serves several hundred recently arrived Latinx immigrants in my community, providing much-needed services, including access to a free medical clinic and tutoring, in addition to being a space where people can find each other and begin to knit a new system of relationships. Open Heartland is located in an abandoned building that had previously been the offices of a recycling center. It had sat for several years, becoming that kind of void on the landscape that you drive by and no longer see. The building wasn’t serving anyone; now it is a center of activity.

Perhaps I’m being superstitious, but I also wonder about the imprint that a previous physical space can make on the work of a new one. A recycling center has a spirit of dedication to re-use, to shared communal dedication toward a better future. When I think of he new “innovation” school, the fact that it will spring from a building dedicated to testing and sorting kids, and basically turning education into a hierarchical game, doesn’t bode well. Nor does its location. The corporate campus is on a triangle of land caught between three heavily trafficked roads. There aren’t neighborhoods very near by, nor are there natural partners in the vicinity.

Natural partners seem central to the success of the kinds of projects described above. The artist Hirschorn purposefully collaborated with community leaders in different cities (Gramsci’s Monument was one of several similar projects he did around the world, each named after a different philosopher), grounding the work in the community so that it was of, for, by them. There are sites all over most communities that beg to be reanimated. To be of use. And the neighbors of these sites are often hungry for the kind of vibrant activity a school would bring.

To wit, in my community, there’s a grocery store situated in an old mall on the south side of town. It closed early in 2019. The store includes a commercial kitchen that could be the focal point of a food-based school. Food is a broad enough subject to be the center of a spoke for many learning topics. Such a school could connect with local farmers and chefs from the myriad of cultures represented in the nearby neighborhoods. (My 19-year old son who took his fair share of AP classes, recently said how wrong it is that he doesn’t know anything about agriculture despite growing up in Iowa the descendent on my father’s side of farmers. I agree, heartily.) The building is across the street from a community college, a natural partner.

Start looking at buildings as possible learning communities, and things look different very quickly. Thanks to a city mandate that apartments must have commercial space on the bottom floor, there are many empty storefronts in our town. One of these, which has been empty for as long as the building was erected nearly a decade ago, sits right next to a stream. This waterway — any waterway — provides enough inspiration for learning about water and pollution and cellular life and living systems to form several years of curriculum. Here, too, there are natural partners in the walkable area: a public arts hub, a bike library, and the courthouse, each of which would provide an interesting lens through which to learn about our environment.

The way we are teaching and doing school right now are harmful to everyone involved, and that means those not directly involved. Schools are one of the most significant ways in which we affect the imaginations, empathic powers, and abilities for change of upcoming generations. I heard a teacher on a podcast recently say how deeply sad and ashamed she is for teaching the way she was expected to teach throughout her career. Now in her 70s, she understands that the history she was spoon-feeding to students was not only filled with half truths but it wasn’t necessarily useful to helping them see into a new world.

I like to play with “what if’s” when it comes to school. I use these these lists to challenge myself to keep thinking beyond the ever-too-basic parameters we’ve been led to believe are inescapable. Try these on, and then make up some of your own. Every time some part of your brain brays back, “Oh, that’s ridiculous; that could never happen.” you’ll know you’re on the right path: What if everyone came out of school knowing repair basics for every major appliance in their lives, including cars? What if to graduate you needed to be able to mend a pair of socks and the holes in a sweater? What if you couldn’t continue to the next grade until you showed that you were familiar with the life forms and life cycles of the place where you live — from geography and geology to hydro history, native species, environmental history, bird calls, paw prints, and seeds? What if from the youngest ages we all learned to identify feelings in our bodies and could tell when we need to leave or reenter a space based on our own emotional barometer? If knew tools to manage our emotions and to help others manager theirs? What if we took turns caring for the place where learned? The creatures near it? Each other? What if caretaking were a taught skill expected of all?

We need this sky-high, preposterous, impossible, against-all odds thinking. We need to flex the muscles that seem most absurd to the managerial parts of us that have us so in their thrall. I’d love to hear your list!