When some of us baby boomers started kindergarten, Granite School District still had a number of classrooms outfitted with vintage desks made of cast iron and wood.
Those antiques were bolted to wooden rails in sets of two so that a horizontal surface protruding from the back of the chair in front served as the desk for the student behind it, and so on down each row.
A round hole on each desktop was designed to hold an inkwell. Inkwells had gone out of fashion long before our time, but the desks’ carved pencil grooves were still useful for keeping your pencil from rolling away.
When Canyon Rim Elementary put me as a second-grader in a new-fangled seat attached to its own lightweight desk that had a lid that opened for storage, I thought no technology in education could ever be more amazing.
Fast-forward more than a half-century to the “conceptual programming phase” of the design work now underway for Granite District’s new Skyline High School.
The district’s forward-looking plan will lead to a specific architectural design.
School administrators, teachers, students, the community and taxpayers all have a stake in the success of a design that must have more lasting utility than inkwells did.
The stakes are high for the layout and furnishings of a more than $80 million high school designed to accelerate learning in the 21st century.
The district is championing a design that will promote collaboration, communication, creativity and flexibility. It recognizes that those are key skills that prepare students for jobs as well as for higher education in an age of rapidly accelerating change.
Some stakeholders who attended schools designed generations ago may look at conceptual renderings of glass-walled classroom “pods” surrounding larger “collaboration spaces” and scratch their heads.
“Where are the chalkboards?” they may wonder. “Where do you hang the posters?” they may ask. From the perspective of the past, those concerns are understandable.
I imagine that if my great-grandmother could have looked into the future at my second-grade desk, she might have wondered, “Why doesn’t it have an inkwell?”
The district’s goal is to build a school to meet not only the demands of education today but also decades into the future.
That is an exceedingly complex task that must be directed by what we currently know and by the outlines of what we can envision.
We know that the key resource in education will always be competent teachers. An effective plan for the future places them at its center. A successful building design will leverage the influence of teachers and enhance the learning experience for students.
We know that the pace of technological change continues to accelerate. Teachers and schools, as well as businesses, government and individuals, must embrace change or be left behind.
The imperative in education, as it is elsewhere, is not technology for technology’s sake, but technology that improves outcomes.
Mediocre achievement by American students on international rankings of competency in reading, science and math underscores our critical need for better outcomes in a competitive global economy.
Granite School District is to be commended for its effort to differentiate between what is merely traditional in school design — the way we’ve always done it — and what is essential in a school design to accommodate evolving technologies, changes in society and advancements in education.
The district also deserves applause for the way it is including stakeholders in its early conceptual planning for the new Skyline High. The district is both listening and leading effectively.
Continued community engagement in this process will contribute to a successful, exciting outcome.
Images of inkwells in a little red schoolhouse may evoke nostalgia, but nostalgia is not what supports effective teachers or advancing students.