Edifying education: though mass education is taken for granted in the developed world, educating future generations is still a vital task that needs the full resources of architectural imagination to create inspiring places and spaces for learning.

Making education accessible and effective is not only one of the great challenges of modern societies, it is also at the crux of their civilized development. The importance of education cannot be overestimated; conversely the lack of it is a persistent root cause of social problems, alienation, dysfunction and criminal behaviour. Some 60 per cent of inmates in British prisons are functionally illiterate and innumerate (AR October 2003), a shameful fact that fuels high levels of recidivism (over half of prisoners re-offend within two years of release). Without their educational needs being addressed, few offenders will be able to build meaningful lives away from crime, no matter how often or long they spend in prison.

The historic relationship between education and society is both complex and revealing, as Eliza Cook, a Victorian poet, wrote in 1853

'Better build schoolrooms for the boy,

Than cells and gibbets for the man'.

Ironically, within the UK, school building is currently one of the more bullish sectors of development. Politicians are acutely aware of the importance of appearing to get education right, mainly by showing how much they can spend on it. Since the present Labour administration came to power, capital investment in schools has risen sharply from [pounds sterling]683 million in 1996-97 to [pounds sterling]3.1 billion in the current financial year. By 2005-06 it is set to rise to [pounds sterling]5.1 billion. (1) Though some of this largesse is being ploughed into progressive sounding initiatives, such as Classrooms of the Future, in reality, much of the funding is being directed at the refurbishment and adaptation of existing facilities. The obvious hope that inspiring new paradigms for educational buildings might emerge from all this should not be overstated, as new projects must endure the baleful scrutiny of the PFI (Private Finance Initiative), the current UK system of public building procurement, which is doggedly driven by the tenets of cost cutting and mediocrity, making it much harder for architects and their clients to be imaginative or experimental.

As a type, the school per se often proves strangely elusive to pin down, evolving to reflect the changing political, educational or social dogmas of the day. Since mass education has constantly and often radically reinvented itself, there is great formal disparity and discontinuity across different eras, with many older buildings still in use. In large urban centres such as London or Manchester, for instance, schooling at all levels still takes place in a diverse array of buildings from the Victorian monolith to the flimsy postwar prefab, patched up and retrofitted as funds and fashion permit, and arriviste redbrick universities rub shoulders with historic seats of learning.

The shape of schools

In his seminal typological survey, (2) Pevsner blithely ignored educational buildings (apart from libraries), perhaps because of the lack of clear historical antecedents. Early teaching methods were modelled on the monastic system or based on trade guilds, with no specific forms of architecture. The Reformation released large numbers of surplus ecclesiastical buildings that were adapted for educational use, but up until then, schooling was a grim affair, with scant provision in the way of premises or equipment. The emergence of colleges such as Winchester and Eton in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries spearheaded the transition to modern forms of school organization and buildings. With their tightly ordered social and physical structures, colleges were a reaction against the often ill-disciplined and undifferentiated character of early schooling, yet the humanly-scaled collegiate network of cloisters and quadrangles has became an enduring template for educational buildings of all kinds, from kindergartens to universities.

Though it is taken for granted in the developed world, mass education is a relatively recent phenomenon. The British Education Act of 1870 made primary education available to all, but Victorian school buildings took their cue from bleak, authoritarian models such as prisons or barracks that could be economically produced to process and subjugate the newly educated masses. In the modern era, the pattern of development changed in response to pressure to build more and more schools, especially in the inter--and postwar years, for a more prosperous and geographically dispersed population. New approaches in educational theory advanced a more liberal and egalitarian curriculum, that found expression in the light, flexible, multivalent spaces of Modernism.

Now, as then, the challenges remain to provide places and spaces for education that can ease the transition from the private world of home to the complex, rapidly changing world of wider society. Everyone remembers with varying degrees of affection their progress through school with its routines and rules, pleasures and punishments. In this respect, education is more than simply the accumulation of knowledge; it is an intensely social rite of passage with school and university as crucial milestones on the long journey of self discovery. There is a proven, explicit connection between the quality of architecture and what educationalists call 'the learning outcome', and the best educational buildings, as in the best education, successfully orchestrate a balance between overall discipline and particular event, between framework and improvization.

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In different ways the buildings in this issue all embody this enlightened approach. The work of German architect Peter Hubner as a designer of highly thoughtful, socially responsive schools needs no introduction; here we look at two of his latest buildings (p44) based on the organic, anti-elitist principles of Rudolf Steiner. Gunter Behnisch's new school at Lorch (p38) also creates a richly nuanced environment for learning while intelligently addressing issues of sustainability, as does Feilden Clegg Bradley's ambitious new campus for the University of Gloucester (p68). Projects by Gould Evans at the University of Arizona (p56) and McCullough Mulvin at University College Dublin (p52) show how to make distinguished object buildings on a greenfield campus yet still create a sense of place, while Stephen Hodder grapples with the challenge of adding to St Catherine's College, Arne Jacobsen's Modernist masterpiece in Oxford (p74). All these enhance the quality of life, for students, teachers and ultimately for society as a whole, nurturing and civilizing future generations.

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(1) Building Design, 9 January 2004, p11.

(2) A History of Building Types, Nikolaus Pevsner, London, 1976, Thames and Hudson.