Who is a public school for, or perhaps, when is it for?
New York City’s high rates of chronic absenteeism and continuing adult education ask for a public school to provide for a student far beyond traditional age bounds of education, and to be radically engaged in the social fabric of its context at all levels.
In understanding and serving that social context, the school relies on Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory as the driving paradigm of both curriculum and form. It is predicated upon an advanced civics and social studies curriculum, taking NYC DOE’s as its base but both faster moving and more flexible. Through the school cuts a ramp, the public, driving and mediating student and curricular relationships to the public and civic programming. The roof is an enclosed park, cared for and programmed by students according to how they see fit to engage with the city around them. In an emotion familiar to all New Yorkers, this space, and the entire school, is ambiguously both theirs but also everyone else’s. The school allows for the broadest definition of a student. It is public, and through this, engenders its own public. Learning never really ends.
