A small Central European revolution is under way as architects and educators reconstruct the idea of elementary education. From Dennik N.
What are your memories of elementary school?
Mine was named after a World War II resistance fighter. A giant picture commemorating him hung was in the school corridor. It was almost black and if you squinted at it hard enough, you could make out a couple of silhouettes of partisans.
My co-worker Tomas Hrivnak recalls that some of his friends went to school in an building with a big entrance hall without a single bench in sight. Kids waiting for the bus or killing time before their next class had no place to sit. No one had any realistic hopes that the school management would install benches.
Along with another colleague, we are chatting in a modern school outside Prague. It feels light years removed from our school years.
We’re in the cafeteria of one the most attractive elementary schools in the Czech Republic, surrounded by second-graders. One is trying to eat strawberry puree without touching the pudding, another observes us through the bottom of his drinking glass as though it were a telescope.
We pretend to feel sorry for them, because they won’t have fun stories to tell when reminiscing about their imperfect classrooms, hallways, and school playgrounds. In reality, though, we envy them going to school in these clean and modern premises,
“Kids spend a lot of their time in elementary school, at an age when they’re at their most sensitive. The type of environment they live in greatly influences their perception of the world. Here they create yardsticks they will later use to assess things. This will be their standard. These kids will have greater expectations, which will also mean more pressure that those expectations be met,” says Ondrej Pihrt, one of the architects who designed the Amos elementary school in the small town of Dolni Jircany, just outside Prague.
Changing Schools for a Changing Demographic
What does a modern school look like? What standards are we handing over to the next generation? The 1980s was the last time there was a wave of school building in Slovakia, and many of these schools are now in need of renovation. We also have towns and villages with large increases in population that are in need of brand-new schools.
First, some figures: There are fewer and fewer children in Slovakia, so it could seem that we don’t need any new schools at all. We are having fewer babies, which means fewer kids attending school later on. Since 2000, Slovakia’s child population has decreased by over 33 percent – from more than 650,000 to 433,000 children. By 2017, one in five classes had been canceled and about 14 percent of schools shuttered, the Finance Ministry reported.
Since the mass construction of schools in the communist era, the big school buildings have been gradually emptying out. The decrease in child population is especially pronounced in areas with the highest unemployment rates, in eastern and south-central Slovakia. The decline in the number of high-school students is even more dramatic.
But we also have another part of Slovakia where there are more and more kids. This is especially the case in and around Bratislava, where more children are being born and entire families are moving in.
Town mayors, who were accustomed to using EU funds primarily to build sewage systems and dumping sites, are now facing a new challenge. How do you build a school for millions of euros, and do so the right way to educate youngsters for the 21st century?
Call An Architect. Once Every Century, the Town Deserves It
When a mayor finally starts building a new school, architecture is usually the last thing on their mind. An architecture competition does not come cheap and it is certain to increase the overall budget. But it is worth it nevertheless. If the new school is built well, it can change the entire town.
“For small towns, this is typically their most expensive investment in a century,” comments the architect Pihrt. The project will cost a lot of money anyway, which is one reason why mayors should be as demanding as possible, he says.
Daniel Kohout became the principal of the Amos elementary school when it was under construction, and he openly says he originally didn’t care about architecture all that much. “I know that a school is not really its windows and its interactive blackboards, but first and foremost its teachers,” he says. His primary task was to attract high-quality teaching staff.
But then he got an invitation from a school principal in another town, where a new school was also being opened. It, too, was a big project, costing some 20 million euros. As he walked through the school and saw its state-of-the-art equipment, its LED lights, its new doors and floors, Kohout felt something was missing. “There was no atmosphere. It was simply a classical building, a long corridor with doors leading to classrooms, a copy-paste of schools from the 1970s. It was then that I realized that we had something unique here,” he says. Designers of schools look for examples of good schools, of what a good school building looks like – one where learning is easy. This is not something that a construction company or a planning engineer can come up with. A mayor or a school principal can have innovative ideas, but neither are they capable of thinking projects through in great detail.
When Pihrt was designing his school 10 years ago, there were only a few schools in the Czech Republic that he could draw on for inspiration. Mostly, he looked for examples of good practice abroad. In Slovakia, we lag even further behind. We are only now starting to think about architecture, visiting the Czech Republic to find inspiration in what are by now dozens of critically acclaimed school buildings with quality architecture.
One of the first attractive, well-designed schools in Slovakia is the private, Slovak Chamber of Architects’ prize-winning Guliver elementary school in Banska Stiavnica. It can serve as inspiration to others, even though, unlike the Amos School, it was built using private funds. Ideally, national and local governments would use approaches that would be just as innovative.
The Catch: It Won’t Be Cheap
Putting up a quality building is always more difficult than a cheap one, acknowledges Pihrt, saying that it can be some 30 percent more expensive. He emphasizes that the mayor and the school principal need to be enthusiastic about the new school, so that the end result is functional. According to the architect, the one person most responsible for the good outcome in Dolni Jircany was the mayor, Milan Vacha. Many problems affected the build and pushed up the cost dramatically. The only thing that prevented the entire process from falling apart was the shared vision of what the school should be. “That is the difference between something amazing and something mediocre being built in the end,” Pihrt says.
Day-to-day operation of a high-quality school will also be more expensive. If a custom-designed window or bench breaks, replacing it is costlier, school principal Kohout admits. But the point is not that we shouldn’t give anything of value to the kids, because they’ll destroy it anyway. “It doesn’t happen that kids knock things down, draw things on the bathroom walls … They understand that this is a nice environment and they treat it with respect,” he says.
A school under construction in Bratislava’s Raca district shows how the authorities and architects can reach a fruitful compromise. The densely populated neighborhood desperately needs a new school. EU funds covered 3 million euros of the 8 million euro cost, and a loan raised another 3.5 million euros.
Raca mayor Michal Drotovan admits the district did not have the money for all the expensive equipment and furniture the architects envisioned. In order to cope financially, the school is being equipped step by step. Classrooms for smaller kids come first; furnishing the wing for bigger pupils must wait for now.
“Of course, the architects would love to have all of it right now, just like in a catalog, so that they can win awards for all of Europe to see. But we don’t have money for that,” the mayor says.
‘Cluster’ Is the Buzzword
In Dolni Jircany, even first graders know the word “cluster.” It means their own little world within the school – with their friends, their teacher, and the pictures on their wall.
The practice of breaking down the larger school environment into smaller organizational units is a trend in many countries. Such clusters, sometimes called hubs, typically consist of two or three classes, with their own corridors and their own “bubbles.” In Dolni Jircany, this fills one floor of the building, where you can find first- and second-grade classrooms. The clusters are separated from one another by short corridors.
Each cluster is color-coded. First grade is yellow, second grade green, and so on, including all that comes with it: bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. The staff room is also part of the cluster. Teachers don’t have to cross the entire building to see their students, but are always at hand. The cluster corridor is cozy, with carpets and bean bags, and kids spend time there during breaks.
With the idea of the cluster foremost, Czech architects are striving for the lofty goal of kids actually liking their school. “They have to accept it as their own, they should want to bring their parents there. It cannot just be a rigid institution, they have to feel it as their own space,” says Pihrt. Dividing a big school into smaller units can help make sure that kids identify with their little piece and create their own atmosphere.
In Banska Stiavnica, too, the school is divided into clusters, even though following a somewhat different logic. This school has 16 classes distributed among four clusters. Each cluster is located on a different floor, and each one also has a specialized classroom. Two clusters are dedicated to younger pupils, two to older ones. Older students shift from classroom to classroom depending on the subject. The cluster for the first two grades is a bit isolated from the rest, to help them better cope with the switch from kindergarten to elementary school.
Each cluster centers around a multi-use hall where kids can play table football, table tennis, and air hockey, study, or just relax. The classrooms are separated from the cluster hall only by a glass partition; the teacher’s room is also glass-walled. “Psychologically speaking, there’s less of a feeling that the kids could do something crazy. They can see one another – the students know they can go talk to the teacher, and the teacher can observe the students,” explains the architect, Richard Murgas.
The cluster halls have a natural feel. Here, students can work in groups if they like, sometimes including students from different classes.
The open space plan also makes sense when it comes to bullying. “There are only very few closed-up spaces here, ones where you could hide,” Murgas says. Even the bathrooms were designed with bullying in mind, with more, relatively small bathrooms than you would expect, each with just two toilet stalls. The room with the wash basins opens onto the corridor. It’s not easy for students to smoke there, or drink beer.
Put the School on Wheels
After four years of work on the school in Banska Stiavnica, Murgas gives his concept of a modern school: It is a building that can change fast. It will adapt to the current situation or generation – not the other way round. “It wouldn’t be right to make all schools in the same fashion. That would be just like it was in the past, when all kids were taught in the same, universal environment.”
Pupils’ chairs have wheels, and it’s not just for fun. “You can change the setup of the classroom very quickly and efficiently. You can group the chairs in a circle, or push them aside completely, or line them up in the classical formation, so that students can follow the teacher standing in front of the blackboard,” Murgas explains.
And it’s not just the chairs that should be on wheels – the whole school should be, too. Thirty years from now, we could have a repeat of the scenario from the 1990s, when the number of school-aged children began falling steeply, and schools designed for large populations remained half-empty.
Everybody’s Writing With a Different Pen
Not all children are the same. In a modern school, teachers know their children well. This means the teacher knows what a child is good at and what their weaknesses are. A modern school deals in differentiated education. This means there is no single objective – say, to solve an equation with three variables – that would be applied to all children. In the new school, teachers take different approaches with children of varying abilities in the same class.
The design concept of the cluster is a great match for this tailor-made approach to education. In schools using clusters, the trend is to have space in classrooms for creating groups or mini-blocs, or even a separate space, divided with glass, for targeted teaching of a group or individual pupils.
The Teacher Can’t Manage It All Alone
All the demands made of the modern school end up on the shoulders of the teachers. On a take-home salary generally of less than 1,000 euros, Slovak teachers are the ones who have to make all the dreams associated with the modern school come true. Inevitably, every teacher needs an assistant in the classroom to help them cope with the new demands. Such as breaking the class into groups, or engaging both the active kids and the introverts, as well as those who are always making new demands.
“If teachers themselves are not supported, we cannot expect them to maintain high-quality education of all students in the long run,” education specialist Petra Fridrichova explains.
In every modern school, support staff are key – psychologists, special educators, teaching assistants. The architects of the Amos and Guliver schools each stressed this. The school in Dolni Jircany has areas where students can form smaller groups, but teachers can only use them properly if they have help with supervision.
“As architects, we create that opportunity for them. But it’s the teachers who have to make the most of it,” Murgas says.
The Catch: How Can You Talk About Assistants When There Aren’t Even Enough Teachers?
On this point, there are so many catches that it’s easier to just say that having the required support staff in every school is just a fantasy for now.
According to the independent body, Centrum vzdelavacich analyz (Center for Education Analysis), EU funds are currently paying the salaries of 3,200 teaching assistants and 1,300 other support staff in Slovak schools. This funding is due to run out this year. Experts have proposed a huge expansion, to some 20,000 teaching assistants and other support staff, at a cost of 355 million euros. The Education Ministry’s current reform proposal is more moderate, covering the current number of assistants, to be paid out of the national budget.
In and around Bratislava, there’s a lot of demand for new schools, and one of the hardest tasks for school principals is to find people who are willing to teach. New schools in the Bratislava districts of Ostredky and Raca are opening classes for kids in grades one through four, and they are looking for teachers. The schools can consider themselves lucky if anyone even responds to their job adverts. In some cases, they have had to accept applicants who do not meet the qualification requirements.
The new school building in Raca also contains six apartments for teachers. The school has already found apartments in public housing for some teachers. According to Mayor Drotovan, this is in fact the school’s only competitive advantage.
“Teachers from outside Bratislava have explicitly told us that accommodation was the only reason they came here. They had offers from all over Bratislava,” he says.
A School Should Stay Awake After Hours
The architect Ondrej Pihrt appeals to all mayors: If you’re already investing so much money in a new school, do you really it to close by 3 p.m.? Why not make good use of it in the afternoon as well?
A school should not be a place where a parent only drops off and picks up their child, perhaps without ever stepping out of the car. It’s an important building where, according to the architect, every town resident should find their own space.
That is why the school in Dolni Jircany invites adults to come and play football in the large gym and offers adult language courses in the classrooms. Cooking classes are another favorite. Civic associations hold their meetings in the school, and there’s a room with a small podium that can be used for conferences.
And the town library – also housed in the school – holds reading events.
“Tonight we’ll have a meeting of the volunteer fire fighter association, soon there’ll be a ball for 300 people,” principal Daniel Kohout says. Three years since its opening (two of which were dominated by the COVID pandemic), the Amos school “truly has its own life even after the kids are gone,” he says proudly.
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Denisa Gdovinova and Tomas Hrivnak are journalists with the Slovak daily Dennik N, where a substantially longer version of this article originally appeared. Transitions supported their reporting as part of an initiative to advance solutions journalism in Central and Eastern Europe.
