Education, Childhood and Anarchism: Talking Colin Ward 9780415820608, 9780203386187

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Education, Childhood and Anarchism

As one of Britain’s most original thinkers and writers, Colin Ward wrote extensively about positive and practical examples from the past and present of the anarchist spirit or the ‘social principle’ in everyday life. This volume is the first scholarly work dedicated to examining the significance of his distinctive and highly relevant contributions to the areas of education, children and the environment. In each chapter, international contributors from academic and activist backgrounds offer cross-disciplinary and critical perspectives on Ward’s work and its relevance to contemporary debates. The book is divided into four key areas: • • • •

The sandbox of the city Adventures in education Reflections on practice Mobilisations.

This book will appeal to academics and professionals interested in the condition of childhood and youth today. It will prove useful for postgraduates and professionals undertaking further professional development, and is relevant to anyone studying, researching or working in fields relating to children, education and the environment not just in the UK but beyond. Catherine Burke is Reader in History of Childhood and Education at the University of Cambridge, UK. Ken Jones is Professor of Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

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Education, Childhood and Anarchism

Talking Colin Ward

Edited by Catherine Burke and Ken Jones

R o utled ge Taylor & Francis Croup L O N D O N A N D N EW YORK

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General view o f the Crawley Adventure Playground

Crawley adventure playground.

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Catherine Burke and Ken Jones The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Education, childhood and anarchism : talking Colin Ward / edited by Catherine Burke, Ken Jones. pages cm 1. Educational sociology. 2. Ward, Colin. 3. Education–Social aspects. 4. City children. 5. Environmental education. 6. Anarchism. I. Burke, Catherine, 1957– II. Jones, Ken, 1949– LC191.E2785 2014 306.43—dc23 2013035121 ISBN: 978–0–415–82060–8 (hbk) ISBN: 978–0–203–38618–7 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

Contents

List of figures and tables List of contributors Foreword Introduction

x xii xv xviii

PART I

The sandbox of the city 1 The city as instructor: pedagogical avant-garde and urban literacy in Germany around World War I

1

3

HÅKAN FORSELL

2 The city in the child: Colin Ward, urban becoming and the shift to experience

19

SIMON SLEIGHT

3 The city as a classroom and the street children of New Delhi, India

33

PALLAWI SINHA AND CATHERINE BURKE

4 On the street where you live: Colin Ward and environmental education

46

KEN WORPOLE

PART II

Adventures in education

55

5 Education for participation

57

EILEEN ADAMS

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Contents

6 ‘A parable of the way things ought to be’: Colin Ward, the Peckham Health Centre and the de-schooling movement

72

EMILY CHARKIN

7 ‘Bringing freedom to education’: Colin Ward, Alex Bloom and the possibility of radical democratic schools

86

MICHAEL FIELDING

8 Playful voices in participatory design

99

ROSIE PARNELL AND MARIA PATSARIKA

PART III

Reflections on practice 9 Playwork: the anarchy wing of sociology

111 113

MARC ARMITAGE

10 Children, self-governance and citizenship

123

ROGER HART

11 Design for urban play as an anarchist parable: transatlantic reflections

139

ROBIN MOORE

12 The photograph as ‘witness’

157

PAT THOMSON

PART IV

Mobilisations 13 Inciting desire, ignoring boundaries and making space: Colin Ward’s considerable contribution to radical pedagogy, planning and social change

173

175

MYRNA MARGULIES BREITBART

14 The practice of radical education, from the welfare state to the neo-liberal order KEN JONES

186

Contents

15 Play as protest: clandestine moments of disturbance and hope

ix

198

STUART LESTER

16 Reclaiming children’s participation as an empowering social process

209

BARRY PERCY-SMITH

Appendix Articles by Colin Ward published in the Bulletin of Environmental Education

Index

221

223

Figures and tables

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 10.1 10.2 10.3

Illustration and reading exercise from ABC – Neue Fibel für Stadtkinder (1914) Berliner Fibel, special edition for Groß-Berlin (1926) Berliner Fibel, special edition for Groß-Berlin (1926) Girls playing “Heaven or Hell” on a street in Berlin (1926) Boys going to school on roller skates during a transport strike in Berlin (1919) Children and adults in Melbourne’s Collins Street pose beneath a statue honouring the inland explorers Burke and Wills, 1865. The cube of hope City priority listing City mapping Model city Students from Pimlico School study the impact of shop display on the streetscape, 1975 Students from London schools at a crit with Eileen Adams, 1981 Students from Cheshire schools present their work and proposals for environmental change, 1980 Students from Priory School, Portsmouth, present their ideas for environmental change, 1981 The Peckham Health Centre building The Centre swimming pool The Centre gym Hanging from railings The small school at the Centre Children from a local children’s rights organization in Guayaquil, Ecuador Children in Harlem, New York City “Through their everyday play with one another children learn the social knowledge and skills to create and maintain social order”

7 8 9 12 14 28 38 39 40 41 60 64 66 68 73 73 75 76 81 124 125 127

List of figures and tables

10.4

10.5 10.6 10.7 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6

“There has been a loss of opportunities for the everyday kinds of activity with their peers that Colin Ward so brilliantly documented in The Child in the City” Children in Harlem, New York City, intercepting adult residents with alternative proposals for the design of a public plaza A “woonerf ” in Utrecht, The Netherlands A playworker in a play park with young children in Tokyo An adventure playground in Berlin Westway as it was (back in 1971) and “as it could be” Westway map, 1969 Westway, present day, a vibrant, linear, urban village running the length of Notting Hill Bland, boring toddler lawn in North Carolina childcare centre Seasonal world full of textures, colours and smells Community animation through play Bringing nature to city kids Front cover of The Myth of Equality Front cover of The Child in the City Girl looking to camera Inside cover of The Child in the City Face at window Sitting waiting

xi

131 133 134 135 142 145 146 147 151 151 152 153 159 165 166 167 168 169

Tables 2.1 7.1

Selected data on children’s minimum urban range, Melbourne, Australia Three concepts of liberty: in praise of democratic fellowship

24 88

Contributors

Eileen Adams is a freelance consultant whose work links art, design, environment and education. For over 40 years she has worked as a teacher, teacher educator, researcher, consultant, examiner, evaluator and writer. She shares the results of her work through publications, conference papers and courses in the UK and internationally. Marc Armitage is an independent consultant, researcher and writer in playworking and the wider social world of children and young people. He is a regular speaker at conferences and seminars in the UK, Europe and beyond, engaging with practitioners, educators and policy-makers. Myrna Margulies Breitbart is a professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a focus on community development, action research with youth and the spatial dimensions of social change. Her interdisciplinary teaching and research focus on urban social and economic inequality, community development and the spatial dimensions of urban struggle and social change. Catherine Burke is an historian of childhood and education based at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Before moving to work in Higher Education, she spent many years working as an adult and community educator in Sheffield. Emily Charkin is researching children’s experiences in anarchist communities in Spain during the 1930s for a PhD at the Institute of Education, University of London. Her work is concerned with radical educational experiments in the past, as a way to cast light on debates in the philosophy of education in the present. Michael Fielding taught for 19 years in some of the UK’s pioneer radical comprehensive schools and for a similar period and with identical commitments at the universities of Cambridge, Sussex and London where he is currently Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education. Håkan Forsell is an associate professor at the Institute of Urban History, Stockholm University and researcher at IRS / Center for Metropolitan Studies, TU-Berlin.

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He has written about property policies and urban growth and about the rise of the ‘knowledge society’ in European cities during the twentieth century. Roger Hart is a professor in the psychology and geography PhD programs of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director of the Children’s Environments Research Group (http://cergnyc.org/). Much of his research focuses on the quality of the physical environment for children, particularly for those living in difficult circumstances and more broadly is concerned with finding ways to support the participation of children in articulating their concerns and perspectives as a way of fulfilling their rights. Ken Jones is Professor of Education at Goldsmiths. He writes about education and social movements, most recently in L’école en Europe: Politiques néo-libérales et résistances collectives (La Dispute, 2011). Stuart Lester is a senior lecturer in play and playwork and professional studies in children’s play at the University of Gloucestershire. He is also an independent consultant. Key research interests focus on the nature and value of children’s play, the playful production of time/space through everyday encounters and conditions under which children’s (and adults) playfulness may thrive. Robin Moore, Hon. ASLA, is professor of landscape architecture and director of the Natural Learning Initiative, College of Design, NC State University, Raleigh, North Carolina. He holds degrees in Architecture (London) and City and Regional Planning (MIT), is past president of the International Play Association, and former chair of the Environmental Design Research Association. Rosie Parnell is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield and a member of the Centre for Study of Childhood and Youth. Her research relates to the sociology of children and education. Maria Patsarika is a research associate in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield and Research Associate and Honors Program Co-ordinator at the Dukakis Center, American College of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests include children’s and young people’s creative learning and civic engagement. Barry Percy-Smith is an associate professor at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He is an experienced action researcher with interests in children’s participation and facilitating participatory learning and change in organisations and communities. He is co-editor of The Handbook of Children’s and Young People’s Participation (Routledge, 2009). Pallawi Sinha is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her research explores indigenous knowledge and practice of education specifically through the arts and environmental frameworks to facilitate learning that is authentic, creative and critical.

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Simon Sleight is Lecturer in Australian History at King’s College London. His recent publications include Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 (Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 2013), and his research embraces urban history, historical youth cultures and the lived experiences of the past. Pat Thomson is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies at The University of Nottingham. Her research interests are in creativity and the arts and their role in school and community change. Ken Worpole is Emeritus Professor at The Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University, and the author of many books on social policy, landscape and architecture. He edited a Festschrift for Colin Ward called Richer Futures: Fashioning a New Politics (Earthscan, 1999).

Foreword

Having helped to bring up five boys, Colin was well qualified at a personal level to write about children. Only the youngest, Ben Ward, was his own son, but they all benefited from the same considerate care of ‘a very kind and non-interfering parent’, in Ben’s words. Like any good dad Colin was ready to be helpful with school projects, but in general he followed the instinctive ‘hands-off’ philosophy of a true libertarian. When it came to vital life-decisions, his role was that of a wise guide, as Ben found when unsure about which of his A level subjects, Music or Philosophy, to pursue at college . . . When I told him my dilemma, Colin went to his typewriter and came back with this message: ‘The world is full of philosophers and full of musicians. But who does everybody want to listen to?’ Ben became a musician. Colin was adept with hammer and chisel. With some waste planks harvested from a skip down the road, he transformed the side-alley of our London house into a garden shed and used the left-over timber to make a puppet theatre, much appreciated by the children of friends with a theatrical bent. Another of his constructions was a joy to adults and children alike. When his brothers had graduated to beds elsewhere in the house, the space under Ben’s top bunk became a landscape complete with houses, trees and roads, soon well used by Dinky cars. Colin’s own schooling was sparse. He left school at 15 – ‘which must have been a great disappointment to my parents’ (who were both teachers) – and thereafter his only formal education was two A levels picked up in evening classes, and at a much later stage, a one-year teacher training course. He was the classic autodidact, whose breadth of knowledge amazed his architectural colleague Peter Shepheard: He is very widely read, indeed it was something of a joke in our office to try and find some subject on which Colin was not informed, but we never managed it.

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Colin himself enjoyed recounting his introduction to anarchism during his Army service in Scotland. The perorations of Glasgow street orators led him to anarchist literature supplied by the Freedom Bookshop in London. Later he was posted to the Orkney Islands, where his night-time Army duties allowed him to spend his days reading these subversive tracts in the shelter of the ancient Pictish village of Skara Brae. In the 1970s we made a pilgrimage to this site of family legend, and to the pier on the island of Hoy where Colin drove a dumper truck into the sea (through incompetence, not sabotage). That was his first and last venture behind the wheel of a vehicle. Notwithstanding his own experience, Colin did not despise the formal education he had missed. He spoke fondly of his well-intentioned grammar school, where his older brother had flourished. And he was well aware that being young and talented in the post-war era of full employment could not be compared with the economic uncertainty of the twenty-first century. Ambitious young people nowadays are obliged to join the educational paper chase. Yet his writings on childhood and education make abundantly clear his conviction that knowledge acquired in the classroom is only a part – perhaps for some children the least important part – of their intellectual equipment for adult life. Colin’s interest in housing and the built environment began with his first job, in the Borough Engineer’s department of his East London suburb. After that he worked for 15 years in architectural practices, before and after his Army service. In 1964 he took a new tack into teaching in technical colleges, with the liberalising catch-all subject of General Studies, until in 1971 the perfect job for his expertise came along: to devise and direct educational work for the Town and Country Planning Association. With his colleague Anthony Fyson, he started the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE) to promote their ideas in the teaching world, supplemented by articles, lectures and conferences – and for Colin, a series of other publications. He had been a stalwart of the anarchist press since 1945, notably with the monthly journal Anarchy, which he founded and edited from 1961 to 1970. Writing for a wider audience began modestly with two Penguin Connexions booklets on Violence and Work (1970 and 1972). In the next three decades a steady stream of books, talks and journalism clattered off his typewriter. A pretty cedar-wood summer house appeared in our garden, where he could work undisturbed by the hubbub of family life. In writing about topics that concerned him, sometimes with like-minded collaborators, Colin had found his true métier. This became his fulltime occupation when we moved to Suffolk in 1980. Probably the best known of his output are two classics: The Child in the City (1978) and Anarchy in Action (1973), the latter translated into several languages (a new Spanish edition of Anarquia en Accion was published in 2013). But his subject matter was wide-ranging, from the history of squatting to the building of Chartres cathedral; from allotment gardening to the global water crisis. None of these books made him rich, but their insights influenced the thinking of professionals in many fields. The variety and content of contributions to this celebratory volume is

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testament to that; a fitting tribute to the diversity of Colin’s own interests. He would have been surprised but immensely gratified to see such thoughtful recognition of his work. Harriet Ward

Acknowledgement Ben Ward’s remarks, and Peter Shepheard’s, are taken from Remembering Colin Ward 1924–2010 (Five Leaves Publications, 2011). Colin was filmed by Mike Dibb in 2003 in a DVD: Personally Speaking – Colin Ward in Conversation with Roger Deakin.

Introduction Catherine Burke and Ken Jones

Colin Ward was interested in everything that concerned relationships between human beings and the world they have made. He wrote subtly and engagingly over many decades about a staggering range of subjects, from a perspective that, in its concern for creativity and autonomy as qualities realised against the grain of state domination, was classically – though not confrontationally – anarchist. This book concerns three of the topics illuminated by Ward’s perspective – childhood, education, the built environment, and the relationship between them. Ward’s influences were historical and global. He drew inspiration from eighteenth and nineteenth century dissenters and anarchists from the British Isles as well as from other parts of Europe and America. He was an admirer of his contemporaries, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, advocates of critical pedagogy and de-schooling. The latter was for Ward a personal project: leaving school at 15, he began his education seriously thereafter, ever following his curious mind. Discovering anarchism as a young serviceman during the Second World War, he assembled through his eclectic and extensive reading a band of lifelong literary companions – among them Peter Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes and Paul Goodman – who had in their own lives and writing thrown light on the capacities of humankind to educate and organise itself, resisting and sometimes defeating the destructive forces of national governments. Inspired by work like theirs, Ward came to his own view of anarchism. It was not some future utopian state arrived at through a once-and-for-all, transformative act of revolution. It was rather a present-tense thing, always and already ‘there’ as a thread of social life, its existence traceable through attentive analysis of its myriad ways and forms. To reveal its ever-present nature in places that were generally overlooked and undervalued, was the task of Ward’s life. Ward was a classic autodidact, seeking connections between fields of knowledge around which academic fences are too often constructed. At the heart of his many enthusiasms was an interest in the meaning and making of space and place, as sites for creativity and learning; and it was when he encountered the work of Patrick Geddes, via Lewis Mumford, that his own de-schooling and re-education commenced. This was a process through which the familiar became strange, revealing within it the half-realised potential of another way of living and seeing.

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The Outlook Tower, reconstructed by Geddes in 1890s Edinburgh, represented both the symbolic and the literal point from which such a perspective became possible. It stood high above the city, at its top a camera obscura that enabled Geddes to offer a new view of Edinburgh, in its relationship with the region and the ocean that surrounded and supplied it. A material structure with a camera at its heart, it was an early example of the power of visual technologies to challenge the normal optics of daily life: it was at once an unsettling educational device, a planning tool and an invitation to citizenly debate. Rising above the city, it also served Ward as a reminder of the importance of transcending any kind of political, nationalistic or religious separatism. Ward’s ideas about childhood involved a similar defamiliarising gaze that was less concerned with criticising the limited vision of policy than opening new spaces of thought and action. He took his cue from the exiled Russian radical Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), whose meditations on individual development and social change Ward describes as a major political influence. For Herzen, ‘the purpose of a child is . . . to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child’ (Herzen, quoted in Ward, 1991: 51). To Ward, this suggested that those who wanted to reflect on childhood, could best do so by setting idealisations and attributed characteristics aside and by following, instead, what children actually do when they play. His writing brought front and centre the hidden or overlooked, the less frequently or closely observed, the incidental and the marginal. It tracked the ways that children in any time or place tend to occupy peripheral spaces in their play, and are afforded by society a marginal social status, as school pupils serving their time as ‘not yet’ adults. As Ward noted, however, children are not ‘apprentice’ but ‘actual’ makers – natural builders and manipulators of their environments and material objects they find there. He questioned why such creativity was hidden from public view, sequestered by the restrictive, unimaginative institutions within which compulsory schooling confined mass education. Why was the absence of children of school age from town and city streets so easily taken for granted? And why was their occasional presence so often seen as troublesome? Journeying, as always, beyond critique, Ward suggested what might follow, in terms of educational implication, from the facts of children’s creativity and curiosity. Casting childhood in his own image, he thought curiosity was an essential motive in children’s learning. Its encouragement should be central to their education – though this was often denied by the imposed formalities of the school curriculum, and was more likely to be nurtured in ways that brought children into direct, questioning contact with the significance of objects, places and things. In remembering Ward’s writing about education and childhood, we think first of his classics of unschooled life, The Child in the City (1978) and The Child in the Country (1988) which, as is evidenced in this volume, influenced a generation of scholars and practitioners. But his gaze also turned in the direction of formal institutions and to the possibilities of constructive work around them. He devoted eight years of practical experiment and advocacy to his work on the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE), between 1971 and 1979. His bulletin articles addressed their

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intended readers, teachers foremost among them, with practical optimism about the possibilities of Streetwork and the ‘exploding school’. He wrote as if change were always possible, and in this was perhaps spurred on by a fierce counterargument proposed by powerful voices from the political and cultural establishment, who sought to trivialise ‘discovery learning’ and demonise its advocates. The impact of the Black Papers (1969–1977), James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech (1976) and the Conservative governments of the 80s and 90s might appear at first sight decisive. Initiatives like these created the conditions in which BEE came to an end, evicting progressive practice from the warrens of experiment developed by Ward and many other educators. Nevertheless, if school as re-constituted after the Education Reform Act of 1988 does not allow the potential of Streetwork and Environmental Education to be realised in the ways that Ward and his colleagues at the BEE wanted, the ideas survive regardless, carried forward by untold numbers of teachers, adult-educators, playworkers, artists, designers, architects and others – several of whom are represented here. Among our contributors are scholars, activists and practitioners who worked with Ward personally or who encountered his writing about childhood, environment and education and have been powerfully influenced by it. Some, like Eileen Adams, are able to account for that influence by recalling their years of collaboration. Others, such as Roger Hart and Robin Moore, whom Ward once described as ‘the young lions’ of a movement that recognised play at the heart of children’s experience, reflect, three or four decades later, on the way this emphasis has endured, to shape a global practice. Ward thought of intellectual work as something creative and collaborative. His collection of essays, Influences: Voices of Creative Dissent (1991) is a reflective personal encounter with anarchists, socialists, philosophers and architects who had shaped his view of the human condition. Our collection replicates this tracing of influence through networks of ideas and practices, but in our case the central, generative point of the network is Ward himself. This book is an unusual interdisciplinary project that touches on architecture, history, urban geography, landscape design, political theory and practice, education and play work. At its heart are two kinds of question. One concerns adults’ views of children, of what childhood is and what children are capable of, or need protection from. The second focuses on the way that children themselves engage with the world around them – and in doing so it aims to take seriously children’s views and perspectives. Colin Ward died in 2010. In March 2011, the Faculty of Education at Cambridge hosted a conference to reflect on those aspects of his work that touched on childhood and education. Around a hundred people attended, from the US, the UK and other parts of Europe – academics, participants in the emerging student movement, social activists and teachers. Each had been influenced by Ward. In different ways they continued to be impressed by his vision of the possibilities for a fuller social life that were inherent in the appreciation of children and young people as powerful shapers and builders of their environments. We have grouped our selection of papers from the conference under four headings. In ‘The Sandbox of the City’ (a phrase we have appropriated from Ward),

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writers reflect on education, experience, play and learning in Australia, India, Germany, and – glancingly – England. Simon Sleight, in a Ward-like perceptual shift, views nineteenth-century Melbourne in a new light, in terms of the affordances the city provided for ‘youthful autonomy’, as young people tried to make out of the expanding, colonial, inchoate Victorian city a space that was their own. Pallawi Sinha and Catherine Burke make a similar turn towards the street. In their case, the focus is on children who have made the urban spaces of present-day New Delhi what UNICEF calls ‘their habitual abode’. Sinha’s firsthand research into street children’s knowledge provides startling support for Ward’s maxim that the city, amid all its other qualities, is a place of learning. Sleight’s focus is on children’s work and play; Sinha and Burke are interested in how children represent the city, on the basis of an experience that is both harsh and resourceful. Håkan Forsell, in his discussion of Wilhelmine and Weimar Berlin, turns our attention towards the school. He shows how educators sought to re-present the city as an environment that lent itself not only to the détournement of children’s play, but to new possibilities for formal learning. In the course of their work the urban child was recognised as a new social type, with new educational needs. What followed from this, Forsell emphasises, was seen by reformers as a political necessity: what children learned in and about the city was too important to questions of social order to be left to the haphazard encounters of the street. Though these might overwhelm the senses, only the school could provide a means of stepping back from spectacle and sensation into a position of responsible understanding. Forsell’s illuminating repositioning of educational thinking, as one part of a more general attempt to understand the city as producer of new identities, capacities and risks, is complemented by Ken Worpole’s chapter. Worpole shows how Ward’s thinking belongs within an important nexus of twentieth-century thought that connects aesthetics, politics, design and democracy. William Morris and the thinkers and artists of the Bauhaus movement are in this sense some of Ward’s obvious counterparts and peers. In Worpole’s account, Ward both learned from, and added to, these traditions. The Child in the City and his collaborative work on BEE may have borrowed something from Lefebvre and situationism, but in its deft weaving together of so many strands of work, it added a new line of thinking, concerned with the ways in which education by and in the city might produce free-minded and autonomous individuals. Looking at the fenced and gated fortress-schools of contemporary London, Worpole notes that such a project is far from realisation. The second section, ‘Adventures in Education’, focuses on the possibility of institutional change within state systems of education and health, less in the limited spaces of the present day, than in the years between the 1930s and the rise of Thatcherism, where a system more decentralised than some mythologies allow, afforded opportunities for experiment that were, on occasions, boldly grasped. Michael Fielding writes about the work of Alex Bloom, headteacher of a secondary modern school in 1950s East London, who sought to build ‘a consciously

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democratic community . . . without regimentation, without corporal punishment, without competition’. Reflecting on Bloom’s achievements and popularity, Fielding suggests that a similarly assertive idea of democratic fellowship would do much to supply present-day reform with a sense of purpose and solidarity. In a corresponding article, Emily Charkin reconstructs the experience of the Peckham Health Centre in South London; built in 1935, it was closed in 1950, when its co-operative form of organisation, with patients paying a small membership fee, proved incompatible with the requirements of the National Health Service for health care to be free at the point of use. Like Bloom and his school, the health centre was both popular with its community and committed to radical experiment – so much so that it served British anarchists for a number of years as a model for self-organised forms of public provision. Charkin, like Fielding, salutes the achievements of the institution on which her study focuses and reflects on the conditions necessary to revive an alternative provision of public services, committed to learning and health care for all. Eileen Adams’ contribution maintains, for the most part, the London focus of Fielding and Charkin, though it moves in time from the cash-strapped forties and early fifties to the tail end of the long boom, in the 1970s. Adams’ article is a valuable account not just of ideas and principles, but of the organisational and entrepreneurial initiatives that sustained a practice of radical educational change for which, in the labyrinths of a pluralist system, it was possible to find state funding. Such change did not grow out of uncultivated soil; as Adams makes clear, the flowering of progressive initiatives in the 1970s was made possible by decades of earlier work – artistic, intellectual, educational. Fielding, Charkin and Adams reveal an image of the past, which for all its achievements, appears in hindsight to be fragile and endangered. It is not just that the particular pasts (statist or co-operative) of the post-war period are over, it is also the case that their very memories are in jeopardy, as new educational discourses, both Conservative and Labour, work hard to misremember them, as undisciplined, unfocused ventures, unable to generate a serious movement of reform. At the same time, the new institutions and projects of reform remain, it seems, firmly closed to radical influence. Rosie Parnell and Maria Patsarika, in their article on student voice, suggest that this might be too pessimistic an interpretation. The discourses of the contemporary state, with their emphasis on the participation of citizens on the outer rim of governance, provide, despite themselves, the opportunity for non-subservient practices that resist or divert dominant meanings. To this extent, there are always seeds beneath the snow. The travel and global reach of Ward’s work and the geographical scope of his ideas is an important theme in this volume. In the third section of the book, ‘Reflecting on Practice’, we have responses from individuals who – in different ways and from different parts of the world – continue to be influenced by their first encounters with Ward and his writing. Following the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989), there has been internationally a flourishing of efforts to enable children’s views and experiences to be taken into account in all

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matters that concern them. Several contributors reflect on the impact of these initiatives and on the fundamental differences between the state-focused and responsibilising ‘democratic’ paradigm that underpins recent and contemporary efforts to involve children in decision-making at home or at school and the kinds of behaviours and activities that Ward and others envisaged. Roger Hart, originally from the UK, realised the universal application of Ward’s thinking about how children relate to their environment through play and took this perspective with him to the US, thereafter applying it across the Majority World, in decades of work that supported the growth of children’s participation in community development and environmental planning. Hart’s essay extends the discussion of the range of possible forms that children’s participation in decision-making can take. It draws on a series of positive examples, that stand in strong contrast to the more tokenistic gestures towards consultation so often found in the more developed nations. This account, underlining Ward’s global reach, finds echoes in Pat Thomson’s piece, in which she describes her first encounter with The Child in the City when she was a newly appointed head teacher in a challenging school environment in South Australia. Thomson focuses on the power of the image: Ward’s work, with accompanying images by Ann Golzen, exemplifies the link between documentary photography and movements for social and educational change. She reminds us of their common involvement in a project of emancipation. Marc Armitage and Robin Moore, also reflecting on the 1970s and 80s, describe the emergence at of a new field of professional activity – playwork – that grew out of the adventure playground movement in the UK. Playworkers discovered in Ward’s writing a theoretical and interpretive framework for an everyday practice that assisted children and young people in their pursuit of play experiences. Moore reflects on his personal journey toward playwork via community initiatives in the UK and the US, finding much in common with Ward’s work and career., from architectural training to a lifelong interest in the planning, design and management of the built environment to support creative childhoods. Meanwhile Armitage, not only influenced by Ward but also by Moore’s own classic study, Childhood’s Domain (1986), reflects on the vital necessity for playwork of close observation of what children actually do when they play, and the important link between what and where play happens. Moore and Armitage both explain how their early experiences with playwork were highly experimental and instinctive and that Ward was one of a number of theorists and practitioners – in fields as varied as Evolutionary Biology and Landscape Design – who inspired them. The final section of the book, ‘Mobilisations’, contains illuminating projections and implications of Ward’s appreciation of anarchism in action. While Ward, following the eighteenth-century anarchist William Godwin, saw the limitations of an education system that was always tied to the state’s political and economic interests, he nevertheless understood schools as sites of potential disruption, resistance and liberation or as Ken Jones here calls them, ‘fields of opportunity’. Barry Percy-Smith takes up this theme. He offers an approach to school-based pedagogy that draws from the framework of Action Research to suggest how, in school

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contexts, young people can be encouraged to engage deeply with issues and problems that concern them. Like Hart, Percy-Smith sets up a contrast between Ward’s appreciation of the schoolchild as a community resource and the current surge of interest in consulting children within a framework of limited and standardised representative democracy. Like John Dewey (1859–1952), Ward regarded democracy as an always incomplete project which successive generations needed to build anew – a process that schools were best placed to tackle through new kinds of curriculum and pedagogy. Ward proposed that children were not only natural builders and makers of their physical environments, but that their proclivity for recreating their world through realistic or fantastical play, their impulse towards friendship and group-making, their open-mindedness and disposition towards learning, brought to environmental design all of the qualities that were lacking in state-driven projects of change. From this perspective, both the meanings of childhood and the scope of anarchism were extended, a theme taken up by Stuart Lester. Lester argues that the ideas Ward developed in The Child in the City, however much they belong to the 1970s, continue to be relevant now, at a time when childhood is a focus of both anxiety and regulation. His chapter is a reminder that the dominant modes of thinking about children’s play increasingly link it to formal learning environments in ways that run completely counter to play’s intrinsic meaning as fulfillment of children’s own individual and collective desires. Play, Lester’s counter-argument suggests, contains within it micro-revolutionary and clandestine elements – ‘play as protest’, as Ward described it. These ‘fleeting pockets of anarchy’ for Lester offer opportunities for adult–child relations to be re-shaped in the interests of adults as well as children – a truly democratic possibility. Like Percy-Smith, Myrna Breitbart examines Ward’s belief that conditions already exist that can be utilised to incite the desire for change. Engagement with the built environment is vital in this respect, and Ward, she notes, made manifest not only its aesthetic dimension but also the ways in which environments encoded the distribution of power and influence in society. Ward’s ‘anarchist geography’, Breitbart argues, can be partly explained by his appreciation of the biologist, botanist and planner Patrick Geddes, whose work she discusses in relation to Ward’s contribution to the notion of participatory citizenship. She offers contemporary examples of initiatives that might enable this citizenly vision of the environment to be realised, in inspirational architectural practices designed to engage communities in urban planning. Ken Jones links Ward’s work to contexts that are more explicitly political. He situates Ward’s 1970s writing in the BEE and in his books within the context of a range of radical experiments and probings that created niches and openings for change within and against the state system. He posits that for a period of some decades in the twentieth century, structures of schooling, while never breaking free of their links to a repressive social order, appeared to offer opportunities to teachers for experimentation – something that Ward admired – until the impact of the 1988 Education Reform Act encouraged conformity. After more than two

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decades of neo-liberal success in closing down the education system to experimentation and risk, Jones suggests that recent global mobilisations, particularly those led by the creative initiatives of educated young people, offer hope in the form of effective resistance to the prevailing (rather limited) notion of what education is for. That Ward can stimulate the wide range of responses that are gathered here is a tribute to the richness, variety and long-lasting impact of his work. He shares with some of the most valuable thinkers of the twentieth century a desire to keep open the channels between childhood, education, creativity and social change. The distinctiveness of his work, in this common context, is its quiet insistence that by addressing the familiar, ever-present and pressing concerns of every generation in living and learning, it is possible to embody some elements of an achievable future. No warranty is required for such a project: it does not require a secure and immediate home in some larger programme of change. It makes a critique of present social and political arrangements, of course, but it suggests that the responsibilities and the energies of radicals should not stop at that sometimes debilitating point. Rarely has such a set of understandings been needed as it is now.

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Part I

The sandbox of the city

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Chapter 1

The city as instructor Pedagogical avant- garde and urban literacy in Germany around World War I Håkan Forsell

Introduction In the modern era, at least since the Enlightenment, features of social anarchism can be observed in recurrent attempts to challenge the school curriculum and the educational upbringing of children. From Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Paulo Freire, one can follow a pedagogical tradition that confronts conventional instructions, state directives and a book learning remote from real life, in order to have children master their own environment and social relationships. Colin Ward belonged to this tradition. His ideas about environmental education found resonance in the 1960s and 1970s in overlapping movements that aimed to rethink and re-evaluate the modern city as a living environment for children. In The Child in the City (1978), Ward aimed at the integration of children in the urban environment, in order to get them out of the artificial containment of the school and into society as fully recognised and active citizens. He recalled previous scattered witnesses from the twentieth century to illustrate how: [the] city is in itself an environmental education, and can be used to provide one, whether we are thinking of learning through the city, learning about the city, learning to use the city, or to control or change the city. (1978: 176) The sense of urban crisis in Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s had, of course, strong economic and social origins. But the debate was also influenced by a notion that it would be possible to restore, or re-establish, connections between social life, knowledge, skills and the urban environment of a sort that were believed to have co-existed previously, before urban planning, car traffic, sprawling suburbs and residential segregation. Contemporary social debates indicated that children in cities had once had access to their own local sphere, like a habitat, a social and cognitive completeness; an enclosed treasure box full of valuable relations and knowledge. The American educational historian Daniel Calhoun wrote in 1969 that post-war urban planning had actually crushed a system of cognitive exchange that used to

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be a power source for the social and economic modernisation of Western European cities: “The city has been intruding into the learning process as a kind of Automatic Teaching Environment – poorly and chaotically programmed, but effective for all that . . .” (1969: 312). This preoccupation with the relationship between social knowledge, educational institutions, and the urban environment had in fact materialised earlier. The decades surrounding World War I were formative of a new attitude towards social and educational ideals in relation to urbanised culture. In this chapter, I will turn my attention to an educational reform movement in predominantly Germanspeaking cities at the beginning of the twentieth century and discuss aspects of urban environmental education that cast a persuasive historical perspective on the work of Colin Ward.

Großstadtpädagogik – The child as a pupil in the city During the mature phase of industrialisation and urbanisation in Western Europe around 1900, reform-oriented and progressive teachers and intellectuals did not usually trust the society that existed immediately at hand. From their perspective, the modern urban environment did not provide the most suitable context, reference and resonance for the work of the school. John Dewey had in The School and Society (1900) reacted against this intellectual distrust of the industrial society and given teachers in the cities the task of restoring the values that lay behind the factory buildings and industrial complexes, the values upheld by social ties, of families and neighbourhoods. He argued that the principal problem of education was how to adjust the child to life in the city. How should the school integrate the advantages of modern society and at the same time offer other aspects of life, such as personal responsibility, occupational pride and both tactile and intellectual knowledge of the necessities of existence? According to Dewey, the contemporary disconnection between school and society was not the result of some kind of degeneration of society’s vital functions due to economic development, nor of a sudden widespread ignorance of that which still constituted the great moral issues – honesty, thrift, community. Rather, it was caused by “an inability to appreciate the social environment that we live in today” (Dewey 1972/1903: 21ff). The impact of Dewey’s pedagogical thinking on the general reform movement became increasingly strong during the era of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). But around 1900, his social-cognitive approach to learning was in certain aspects problematic for other approaches to instruction and upbringing in German society. The notion that the child needed a “private inner space” was essential to hegemonic, bourgeois educational thought and praxis, and corresponded to a strong spatial individualisation of the lived environment (Wietschorke 2008: 210). The conviction that the process of learning depended on a dynamic relation between the child and the child’s immediate environment was also difficult to reconcile with one of the most startling writings of the time, Ellen Key’s The Century

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of the Child (in German translation in 1902), which advocated a child-centred approach to education and parenting that would free the children from external constraints, enabling them to develop their own inner abilities. However, there were exceptions. During the 1910s and 1920s, the concept of Großstadtpädagogik (metropolitan pedagogy) found a foothold in educational practice and schooling debates in larger urban areas in Germany and Austria. The advocates of this loosely organised reform movement – predominantly progressive, socially liberal primary school teachers in rapidly growing cities like Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg and Vienna – emphasised urban space as a learning environment of the utmost importance. They experimented with excursions, object lessons and new textbooks to “adjust” the official school curriculum to real-life situations and demands. They also sought to put into practice the conviction that the city could serve as a vehicle for democratic culture based on secular, non-confessional teaching and community awareness. The teachers wanted pedagogical practice to overcome the phobia of the big city. Urban children lived in environments of learning that needed recognition. And for the educational reform movement this consideration should not be seen as a limitation (Fuchs 1906: 3ff; Tews 1911: 2). The holistic approach of the metropolitan educators included elementary skills, which could be seen in the efforts made in textbook production and in the didactic renewal of ABC books for the youngest pupils. The pedagogical efforts of metropolitan instructors embedded the subjects taught, and especially reading and writing exercises, in a recognisable and meaningful context – the urban environment as the child’s home environment. The ambition went beyond the purely technical skills of reading and writing: literacy conceptualised the possibilities of independence and communication and thereby created an ability on the part of the individual child to find a meaningful position in relation to society’s increasing demands for rationality, specialisation and autonomy. Fritz Gansberg, a primary school teacher in Bremen, was one of the leading figures in this opposition to traditional schooling. The explicit purpose of his 1904 textbook, Streifzüge durch die Welt der Großstadtkinder, was to conquer a new thematic field for lesson content, namely the field of urban culture. According to Gansberg, “. . . the urban child did not have every-day experiences of nature, and since nature was not alive, then neither could the words of the teacher come alive.” (Gansberg 1904: 1ff). Gansberg’s programme became the point of departure for other instructors who wanted to integrate attention to the urban environment in already established approaches to teaching, which had taken pupils outside the school gates, into rural settings. Prior to 1914, a series of alternative textbooks were produced comprising lists of vocabulary, simple descriptions of recent innovations and infrastructure, with overviews of the urban landscape. Instead of the common static visualisation on large boards in the classroom, direct interaction with the surrounding environment was emphasised through excursions and projects. The city itself was used as an “object lesson”. One other early proponent of the method, the Leipzig primary school teacher Arno Fuchs, recommended in a textbook that object teaching through the city

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should start with some kind of a creative overview. This was represented by an imagined balloon trip over the cityscape, described in a lively way by his textbook, the idea of which was that, guided by the teacher, the pupils should become acquainted with the details and important connections and dependencies in the real city. The city offered a multitude of concrete examples of innovations that, according to Fuchs, could be used for schooling. For example, in natural sciences the steam engine, electricity, the telegraph and magnetism could demonstrate everything which provided for and supported urban society in its progress. The only “pedagogical” approach that Fuchs expressly discouraged was to take the subway/underground with school children. The experience had no didactic advantages, he wrote, when the understanding of the environment was fragmented and did not provide a holistic experience (Fuchs 1906: 3, 17). History was likewise relocated in an urban context. Local history had been dismissed by other reformists for its tendency to introduce fantastic elements and romanticism into teaching. For metropolitan pedagogy, however, history had a place – not as a means of exploring a distant past, but rather as a means of introducing the kinds of knowledge and competence required by contemporary demands. Consequently, local history in the city was considered urban science, since the modern city had become the place of origin for generations of citizens. In this chapter I intend to study and analyse three major fields of interaction that urban educators found especially important from the point of view of working towards a new knowledge relationship between the child and the environment: first, the child’s encounter with the written word; second, the child’s contact with city streets; and third, the development of play as an essential learning practice in the child’s home environment.

The textbooks of urban literacy The textbooks produced by the metropolitan educators aimed to change educational practice. They took an interest in teaching methods as cultural techniques that depended on social and environmental context. The Fibel, the traditional German primer, was the main vehicle for teaching literacy. The Fibel had a double function: it was a tool for the alphabetisation process as well as instrument for socialisation. Hence, the primer combined instruction with representation. Simple illustrations conveyed social values and ways of categorising the world and were integrated into an overall didactical concept. During their early years at school, pupils were set an assignment to compose their own Fibel, using everyday observations and descriptions of occurrences and “snapshots” of their lives. In this, it was important that the reality was not overshadowed by the act of writing. Gansberg and other metropolitan educators considered writing to be primarily a social activity. To imitate famous writers or to adapt a literary style was completely wrong and in the metropolitan textbooks, fairytales and fantasy had no place. Instead, the idea was that the child should learn to create connections and understand causes out of the unattached, sweeping

Figure 1.1 Illustration and reading exercise from ABC – Neue Fibel für Stadtkinder (1914).

Figure 1.2 Berliner Fibel , special edition for Groß-Berlin (1926).

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