The search for flexible spaces seems to be a common requirement for schools nowadays: combining classrooms, creating interstitial spaces, installing movable partitions, opening or closing, isolating or connecting. The school of tomorrow must be adaptable to the uncertainties and changes to come. And yet, behind the commonplaces, school architecture is still made up of invariant components, but continues to seek to reinvent itself. For free teaching methods, are docile spaces necessary? 

Before they materialized as standardized school architecture, places of learning and teaching took on many different forms. School, skholê in Greek, defined the free time devoted to study. In antiquity, teachers and disciples passed on knowledge in schools of philosophy. In the Middle Ages, scholastic teaching intertwined reason and faith. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile failed to resist the industrial revolution that followed in the nineteenth century. Education, which brought about major changes – free schooling, a reduction in child labour – was also accompanied by the establishment of power relations. The modern school trains disciplined individuals who conform to the rhythms and rules of industrial society. The school environment thus became a means of discipline, where the architecture itself taught obedience and regularity: straight corridors, closed-off classrooms, rows of desks, and a clear hierarchy between teachers and pupils.