Classroom of the Future - Sense Publishers

THE CLASSROOM OF THE PAST
and a vocational life that is characterised by rapid change (e.g., Dalin, 1998), but it
is another to tackle this problem by actively working on possible solutions whose
conceptual vision realistically stretches beyond the narrow cognitive confines of
business management. The lessons to be learned from 20 th century educational
history are unpleasantly unequivocal: school reforms are all too rapidly held up by
a profit-oriented rationale – in the 20 th century, educational rhetoric and an actual
willingness to invest in our children’s future proved to be seriously at odds.
BRINGING THE CLASSROOM OF THE FUTURE ON ITS WAY: CONCLUDING
REMARKS TO START THE PROJECT OFF
The classroom of the present is by and large an unfortunate combination of the two
developments described above. It is caught in the discrepancy between its
discursive and its material quality.
As a discursive object, it is conceived of as a learning environment that is
expected to foster self-regulated learning and enable the active learner to acquire
knowledge and competencies by collaboratively working within a problem-based
and technologically enhanced learning scenario.
As a material object, however, the classroom of the present is hardly designed
towards translating this contemporary educational discourse into practice. Having
“changed relatively little in the last 150 years” (McGregor, 2004a, p. 15), its
structure still very much resembles the disciplinary rank-and-file design which has
been prevalent since the 19 th century.
Finally, the classroom of the present is characterised by a third parallel to its
predecessors. Similar to the disciplinary classroom of the 19 th century and the
progressive educational classroom of the first decades of the 20 th century, the
classroom of the present is situated within a semantic shift; it is to be found within
the coordinates of a digital and spatial turn, though neither of the two have thus far
had any sustainable influence on classroom-design.
It is against the backdrop of these three characteristics of the classroom of the
present – its discursive, material, and contextual qualities – that the following
conclusions of this historical overview of classroom development are formulated:
There is a clear correlation between architectural modifications of the school and
the classroom on the one hand and socio-semantic changes on the other.
The historical perspective adopted clearly reveals a considerable correlation in the
past between the socio-semantic context of school and the classroom on the one hand
and their respective design on the other. Historical societies had, or at least attempted
to have, learning environments that corresponded with the zeitgeist of their time.
Major educational changes – the two most important and influential changes of the
past two centuries were presented here – were characterised by a striving for formfunction
fit. In contrast to this historical experience of the classroom, the
contributions in this book show how great the gap is between the educational/societal
discourse of our time and the current design of classrooms and schools. To date, it
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