Public education has focused on implementing benchmarks and standardized testing in order to assess performance and parity between schools. Data serves only as an indicator, however, and the greater impression a school has as a community institution cannot be summarized by math scores and reading levels alone. Although the involvement of metrics intended to promote greater equality in school performance, these approaches, instead, serve to reinforce existing class and cultural divisions between students.
Adapting techniques from the Montessori method, schools might instead serve as “soft formworks,” providing support where needed but ultimately allowing children to become independent beings capable of shaping their education through their passions and innate curiosity. The shell of the previous school is also taken as a “soft formwork,” a volume in which the programmatic spaces impress onto one another and against confinement by the standard typology of educational institutions. Following a Voronoi logic, each classroom thus becomes a unique space informed by the mediations and misregistrations with its peers and the external environment.
