Problem
In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students—and adults—become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.
Solution
Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals teaching younger children, museums, youth groups traveling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city’s “curriculum”; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situations that comprise their “school” by paying as they go with standard vouchers, raised by community tax. Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network.
Related Patterns
… another network, not physical like transportation, but conceptual and equal in importance, is the network of learning: the thousands of interconnected situations that occur all over the city, and which in fact compromise the city’s “curriculum”: the way of life it teaches to its young.
Above all, encourage the formation of seminars and workshops in people’s homes — Home Workshop (157); make sure that each city has a “path” where young children can safely wander on their own — Children in the City (57); build extra public “homes” for children, one to every neighborhood at least — Children’s Home (86); create a large number of work-oriented small schools in those parts of town dominated by work and commercial activity — Shopfront Schools (85); encourage teenagers to work out a self-organized learning society of their own — Teenage Society (84); treat the university as scattered adult learning for all the adults in the region — University as a Marketplace (43); and use the real work of professionals and tradesmen as the basic nodes in the network — Master and Apprentices (83).
Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 99