Switzerland

Fourteen Clocks on the Wall

Frederik Herman

What do primary school children draw, when they are asked to imagine their ideal school site? Nowadays this question is often asked to gain an insight into schoolchildren’s perceptions of their education environment.  It is also asked in order to work out if school environments meet the needs of the current generation and to involve children in the design processes which aim at creating school buildings for the future. From the 1960s onwards, regular gathering (often on a national level) of pupils’ perspectives of their actual school and dream school increased. Thus, for example, The School I’d Like project (2003, 2015 – United Kingdom) was inspired by earlier public competitions launched by The Observer in 1967 and 1996. As well as this, the University of Göttingen (Germany) set up a large-scale survey in order to gain insight into how school buildings affect pupils. This survey has inspired several students from the teacher training college PH FHNW to further explore Swiss school spaces and places, with a main focus on primary schools. One of these students, Kim Stüssi, is currently writing a Bachelor thesis called “Schul(t)räume”, which links together ideas about “school spaces” and “dreams”. For this, Kim Stüssi has used drawing activities and interviews with forty students from two different groups. In these activities, the children were asked to share ideas about their dream school.

The first time you glance at the pictures drawn in this activity, it is easy to see some different ideas showing up time and again. Several children, for instance, had drawn colourful school buildings with adventurous playgrounds, “green” school gardens and many sports facilities (such as swimming pools and climbing walls); various ways to move within the school (stepladders, slides, elevators, drones, and so on) and school buildings well-equipped with computers, game consoles and vending machines. Quite a few drawings also contained references to the popular computer game Fortnite, by sketching computer/gaming rooms to play the survival game or including a few Fortnite characters. Overall, it could be said that the drawings are situated on a spectrum from fairly “traditional” to modern and futuristic images and representations of classrooms, school buildings and sites. Indeed, some children made a design (partly) based on their actual school environment, whereas others totally broke with the present and chose for a more futuristic or even science-fictional design. Yet, most of the children fused past, present and future. Elements of what one might qualify as old/traditional schools (like classrooms featuring rows of school desks facing a blackboard and/or a teacher’s desk) are often complemented with modern and futuristic elements. However, it was not so much the references to the Fortnite game, but rather the re-appearing traditional analogue clocks which struck me the most. Fourteen pupils-architects integrated in one way or another, whether very prominently or as a small detail in the background, a traditional wall clock in their design. So, these children seem to stick to the traditional, analogue wall clock despite the fact that we are now surrounded by all kind of devices and displays that indicate the time (from wristwatches to cell phones to computers). As such, one gets the feeling that the other time indications are forgotten or even thought of as inferior to the time displayed on the school clock, as if “school time” can only be read on this iconic school device. These children-designers seem to be influenced and inspired by the many Swiss school building facades which are embellished with beautifully ornamented wall clocks.

What makes this device so popular that it becomes a re-appearing motif in these children’s drawings? Allow me to venture into a short symbolic-interpretive exercise and mention a few alternative readings (as questions) that pop up in my mind while having a first look at these images. Is it because the experienced time regime, the school rhythm, the systematised sequences of activities and, thus, the “choreography of schooling” are so characteristic and dominant within the realm of schooling, that the “material time manager” or, let’s say, the “metronome of school life” can’t be absent in their school designs? Is it the shared experience of gazing together at the same clock and of counting down to recreation or lunch time, to the school trip or the end of the school day, which make the clock, as a device of communality and unity, an essential component of their building plan? Or is it because the clock became kind of relic, which stood the test of time and served different generations of pupils, that it deserves to be displayed time and again? Or – imagine a latecomer looking at the wall clock on the school’s facade while crossing the schoolyard and rushing to the classroom – could it be the strong association with school rules and accompanying measures of discipline which make fourteen children depict the school clock? Or is it a kind of visual-material reference to the school curriculum, teaching-learning activities and skills, such as reading the clock and telling the time and, thus, the initiation into time awareness and getting acquainted with the idea that there is ‘a time to every purpose’ – to recite a sentence from the 1965 song “Turn, turn, turn!” by the folk-rock band The Byrds? Yet, the clocks’ pointers in these drawings don’t turn and, thus, seemingly arrest time, if not the floating chain of meanings. Whatever these meanings assigned might be, one thing is obvious: the school clocks, just like church clocks, have become iconic and part of collective visual-material (school) memories and imageries.

Word: Clock

Number 14