Should architecture be taught in secondary schools?

Let us briefly set aside the assumption that anyone in Westminster is considering the addition of architecture to the secondary school curriculum. All that the education secretary actually suggested this week was that the forthcoming Review of Cultural Education would “play a key role in ensuring that children from all backgrounds can reap the benefits of our culture and heritage”.

First, treating architecture as part of our “culture and heritage” rather than part of our everyday lives is indicative of the marginal value that we have allowed our practice and profession to be given in 21st century Britain.

Second, “play a key role” is a familiar political synonym for “be shelved and gather dust”.

Over the course of the last two years, I have visited about 30 of the 50 or so schools of architecture in Britain and Ireland. In every single one of them there is spoken, at varying volumes, the same basic message: something’s got to give.

Now that it seems likely that almost every academic institution in the land – from the University of Cambridge to the North Womblesnatch College of Retail Therapy – will charge £27,000 for an undergraduate degree, the length of architectural education is once again called into question.

But speaking to tutors, I hear a more serious complaint, namely that secondary level education doesn’t prepare students adequately for tertiary level.

In the words of one experienced academic: “It’s become harder and harder – and more and more important – to support students in the shift from expecting transmission-based teaching towards enquiry-based learning.”

There is, to be fair, also some sentiment among others that third level education has, in fact, not done enough to keep up with the innovations that have been taking place in secondary education.

In response to this shift, many schools of architecture treat the first year of undergraduate studies as a foundation, recalling the pedagogy of Johannes Itten’s vorkurs (preliminary course)at the Bauhaus. The vorkurs sought, through a series of formal and material exercises, to erase any preconceptions of design that the student might bring to the studio.

The motivations behind such foundation courses today are different. Besides being guided across that pedagogical gap, academics have to help students across a much wider cultural gap.

By not existing as a subject in the secondary school curriculum, architecture is often chosen for a degree by students with no real understanding of how architecture (as product) is created or how architecture (as process) is practised. For a course whose validation procedures are so focused around the preparation for a somewhat narrow definition of professional practice, it should be worrying how few entrants to part I courses ever complete part III.

The question is not whether architecture should be taught in schools, but within what kind of framework can we best teach pupils both about architecture as product and architecture as process.

James Brown is a researcher in architectural education at Queen’s University Belfast.