The “Classroom” has not changed since it was “Designed”

The learning process in as far as knowledge production is concerned has always had its base and nucleus in the home, and verily became a community based activity. The informal classroom being the community and various levels of community being the basic pedagogical levels. Learners and educators were familiar with one another and the pedagogical situation was informed by the common everyday life that these communities participated in. In this setting there is no all knowing position, or an empty vessel that needs to be filled up. Knowledge production and evaluation is an experience based situation where those who have lived longer pass on information to those still in early stages of human development and cognitive growth. This information then is made into knowledge collectively. In this way even the inexperienced can participate in knowledge production about things they have yet to experience and all this is facilitated by the information passed on, not taught as a complete knowledge packaged which is ultimate and rigid. Thus it’s a two way learning stream flow. Colonialism here in Africa delivered the institutionalization of education, introducing a scuff holding that would last right through the ages until today. The classroom thus was designed. The physical environment is probably the most impactful paradigm shift that faced the learning process and thus the classroom. The comfort zone of being at home or within your immediate community environment was the primary shift. The teacher and the scholar were introduced to each other for the first time in a foreign and unfamiliar environment where the teacher knows and the learner consumes and banks information without a two way flow of cognitive introspection. Classrooms are bigger with less interaction between learners themselves. Formal rooms and buildings were now where learning was happening officially. The layout and design of these cells was a paradigm shift, sitting arrangements in formal rows to create uniform situation. All of this, the environmental/physical changes influenced the teaching style and verily the curriculum content itself. The classroom has not been re-imagined and re-evaluated since these impactful changes came about. Learning has become a very dehumanizing exercise that takes one away from the nucleus of the community and dumps them in a vacuum that requires of them to be banking sponges. In the light of education systems being under scrutiny and criticisms for their lack of quality in terms of curriculum and equality in terms of standard of education in relation to socio-economic status quo, what we should be also scrutinizing and aligning with critique is the necessity of re-imagining the classroom and the learning process itself. There is not much to celebrate or honor in a system that encourages high academic achievement within a dehumanizing curriculum. My suggestion in the words of Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society (1971): “Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries”.