School Facility Ambiance

In composition class, we've been doing a group-written essay. What this means is that we choose a subject that is either boring or interesting, but above all discussable. Then we start with a sample thesis that makes a statement about the subject. For this year's class we started with this statement: People who place a high value on _______________ will prefer a _____________ school facility. Then we started making a list of terms for the first blank, following up with a corresponding term for the second blank. (It was actually a little less tidy than this, but you get the idea. . . ) Some of the words we came up with for the first blank were aesthetics, ambiance, unpretentiousness, flexibility, recreation, mingling of age groups, separation of age groups, security, accessibility, plus some that I can't remember.

In a gradually narrowing-down process, each class member chose several subjects on which they could express an opinion statement that could serve as the thesis for an essay. They developed pro and con lists and bombarded the thesis with questions, and made an outline and wrote each paragraph incorporating all the ways we learned to write good paragraphs. Finally they wrote an introduction and a conclusion, and handed in the finished essays. Among the eight students, one person wrote in favor of constructing a school facility with a great deal of flexibility. Another wrote about the need for providing space for recreation. One good Mennonite wrote about the importance of being thrifty. A homeschooler who is taking the class wrote about constructing a facility that would promote interaction between people of various ages. Another student prizes innovation, but what especially interested me was that three people idealized making good aesthetics and ambiance a prominent feature of a school facility. These people do not want ugly or uninviting in their school experience. I don't blame them a bit.

After I read all their essays aloud to the class, I told them that one of my dream features of a school facility is that every classroom would have an adjacent outdoor space that could easily serve as overflow classroom space on beautiful-weather days. I didn't elaborate a great deal, but I'd love to see wide windows looking out on a fairly private grassy, shady, landscaped area. Separating the indoor space and the outdoor space would be an in-between area covered by a wide overhang on the building, with space on ground level for picnic tables on a paved surface--for eating lunch, or--gasp--doing lessons or working together in groups, or having a class or whatever.

I believe we can do so much better than the standard-issue small Mennonite school. I think the site formula usually presumes that a sidewalk circles the building, with no more than eight feet of landscaping space between the sidewalk and the building. Sometimes the concrete runs all the way up to the building. Beyond the sidewalks is gravel--or maybe pavement in richer communities than ours. In a far flung corner of the grounds is space for a softball diamond, and somewhere closer is a small collection of play structures for the little ones. Somewhere an outdoor slab might provide accommodations for basketball or volleyball.

The main problem with the standard school format is that children encounter nothing but hard surfaces in bland colors all day long. Texture and color and freshness are in short supply, and variety in the physical features of the learning environment is almost non-existent.

I concur with writers who believe that children do not develop optimally without some access to the natural world. Yet for generations, teachers have rued the tendency for children to stare out the classroom windows. Organized sports have been thought preferable to playing among the trees. What if teachers actually had the freedom to lead the way in regular encounters with the outdoors while accomplishing the other necessary tasks of group schooling--because the environment made it easy? Teamwork can happen just as surely when the task is maintaining a landscape or creating bird habitat as when it is trying to score more points in a ball game. Why have otherwise intelligent and good-hearted people bought so readily into the convenient-for-adults/not-good-for-children mindset, and willingly spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars to perpetuate the errors others have pioneered?

To be sure, many factors must be considered when school facility plans are being made. The variety of perspectives in our composition class is a sample of what becomes exponentially more complex as more people's viewpoints are considered. How does one impose some order on the process?

My guiding principle is fairly simple: Do what's best for the people who use it the most. That would be the students, if we're talking about a school facility. And don't assume that what comes to us by way of American or Mennonite building traditions follows the above guiding principle.

And please, please, don't saddle some hapless organization or construction expert with the task of designing a facility for purposes he may not hold dear at all. This is a high-stakes task, and can not safely be carried out without copious quantities of prayerfulness, thoughtfulness, and vision.

Ambiance has to do with the surrounding environment or influence. It encompasses a broad swath of factors, and might seem hard to quantify and accommodate. But the effort must be made nonetheless. Sizable outdoor rooms adjacent to each indoor classroom would help tremendously in creating the kind of ambiance that every school facility needs.

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By the way, do you know how to spell and say ambience or ambiance? Dictionaries and spell checkers vary on both counts.

We tried out various pronunciations in class, even attempting what we imagined was a good French pronunciation--by shooting the last syllable through our nose.