Abstract
This paper utilizes Henri Lefebvre’s work to examine nineteenth century school architecture, in relation to asylums. The deployment of the asylums occurred in unison with the development of public schools. Based on archival research this paper seeks an examination of this interrelated development. The social/spatial arrangement of asylums and schools was not independent and random. The relation between institutions and modes of governance were conditioned through contingent systems of knowledge and practices. This produced separation between lived space, social practices and discursive practices. This paper explores this separation using Lefebvre’s idea of a triad of the perceived, the conceived, and the lived within social space. In other words, the practices and routines constituting production and reproduction (conceived), the symbols and images (representational), and the lived as the complex politically contested aspects formed in social space. Consideration of these domains coincides with deconstruction of the codified meanings and discursive formations, those which often conceal more than they reveal.
Introduction
So what escape can there be from a space thus shattered into images, into signs, into connected-yet-disconnected data directed at a ‘subject’ itself doomed to abstraction? For space offers itself like a mirror to the thinking ‘subject’, but, after the manner of Lewis Carroll, the ‘subject’ passes through the looking-glass and becomes a lived abstraction. (Lefebvre, 1991: 313–314).
Power in schools dictates various hierarchies as opposed to fostering a critical examination of such structures. Schools, for example, value and reward those students who are docile and compliant, while penalizing those who challenge the status quo. This is how schools maintain social hegemony. This can be seen in social/spatial formations of gifted and talented classrooms and the process of tracking students into vocation classes. These formations each have their own specific location, social processes and symbolic meaning. Formations that conceal more than they reveal. Schools today still pathologize students’ behavioral abnormalities in much the same way as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Harwood and Allan, 2014: 17). These pathologies have become commonplace in childhood and youth (Harwood and Allan, 2014). Subsequently, many students today are constructed by medical discourses and enmeshed in power relations (Reveley, 2016).
The aim of this paper is to foster consideration of the ways that beliefs about intellect and abnormality affected the special arrangement of asylums and schools. This paper is situated upon the additional premise that we should also seek to understand educational space historically, as a component of practices produced and reified overtime. This paper argues that the formation of modern public schools was architecturally isomorphic in that that the public-school structure imitated the formation of asylums. Furthermore, this paper argues that compulsory schooling was influenced by the sequestration of those deemed abnormal.
Modern beliefs about human intellect were shaped by the establishment of discourse on intellectual abnormality; many associate the history of psychiatry with mental illness and insanity. Yet, psychiatry is also responsible for the modern conception of human intelligence. This formalization of intelligence developed through the production of a discourse rooted in the abnormal. The history of human intelligence indicates that norms of thought were conditioned through a dialectical antithesis. In other words, the norms for human intelligence were dependent upon what was constituted as abnormal. The idiot became the primary figure to mediate this relationship over the nineteenth century. The history of intelligence, then, should be traced from the early nineteenth century and to idiocy as a formal classification. These transformations in the concept of human intelligence forged a connection between the organization of asylums and schools. Intelligence as a body of knowledge manifested itself institutionally in social and spatial arrangements. The condition that allowed the theoretical formulation of intellectual abnormality to proliferate was its spatial organization.
It is common to hear individuals link the formation and structure of public schools to industrialization and factories. While there is a reality to this connection the formation and structure of public schools should also be seen in relation to the asylum. Science reduces the concept of intelligence to what is believed to be natural, external and irreducible. Examining history and architecture allows one to examine the socio-political aspects of knowledge production.
Methodology
This paper is based on a vast range of primary source material much of which was obtained through the Library of Congress. I draw on a large collection from the Journal of Psycho-Asthenics (Psycho-Asthenics, 1896). This journal was a useful source filled with logistical asylum reports, statistics, case studies, and medical reports on pathology. Furthermore, the Journal of Psycho-Asthenics is a useful resource because it demonstrates clearly the connection between asylum and schools, and the interest psychiatrists had in the development of schools. Henry Barnard’s book on school architecture was also extremely helpful (Barnard, 1849). I located information in congressional indexes, laws related to those deemed mentally deficient, and testimony by psychiatrists (Aldrich et al., 1914). Newspapers provided additional source material for this study. Overall, this study draws on a vast range of primary and secondary sources including asylum reports, case studies, medical reports, books, journals, and other archival sources.
Analytical framework
The organization of asylums and schools was established in an abstract space, a type of looking-glass, in which the subject becomes a lived abstraction. Abstract spaces form concrete practices and arrangements (Lefebvre, 1991). In the context of schools, for example, concrete practices and arrangements grew from the formation of asylums. Therefore, the study of educational space needs a conceptual framework to understand these practices. An understanding of educational practices “requires an examination of how abstract space became the dominant spatial experience” (Ford, 2016: 181).
Lefebvre's spatial triad is the right analytical frame to undertake this study. His model of space is not an abstract or ideological mediation, but is “concrete” (Lefebvre, 1991: 40). Lefebvre helps reveal the realms of activities that make up social space (Christie, 2013: 776). As Pam Christie notes, “Lefebvre’s concept of social space opens consideration of the different spatial practices of schooling, the representations of schooling in policy and the everyday experiences of schools in different places” (Christie, 2013: 775).
Examinations of space are commonly reduced to description and dissection, or things in space, pieces of space simply described. “The result is that all focus is lost as the emphasis shifts either to what exists in space (things considered on their own, in reference to themselves, their past or their names), or else to space emptied, and thus detached from what it contains: either objects in space or space without objects, a neutral space” (Lefebvre, 1991: 91). Lefebvre helps us better understand spatial practices, representations of practice and representational practice. The triad of the practical, the symbolic, and the imaginary is not an abstract model of space (Lefebvre, 1991: 40). Accordingly, we need to understand space in relation to practices that produce it (Christie, 2013). In schools “we may see the routine activities of schools as demarcated spaces, their recognizable design, and the many images of everyday life at school as examples of perceived–conceived–lived activities in the production of space” (Christie, 2013: 776).
The examination of the institutional space of asylums and schools must include the perceived, the conceived and lived social space (Lefebvre, 1991). In other words, the practices and routines constituting production and reproduction (conceived), the symbols and images (representational), and the lived as the complex and politically contested aspects of space. These practices and routines often obscure more than they expose.
Research should consider the characteristics surrounding human intelligence in relation to social transformations of society (Lefebvre, 1991). We need to examine the complexity of intertwined and overlapping practices in spaces (Christie, 2013). Lefebvre revealed that studying or theorizing space is equivalent to studying or theorizing society. Likewise, examining the spatial arrangements of schools reveals the broader sociological implications and belief systems impacting society. These considerations need to coincide with deconstruction of the codified meanings and discursive formations that underlie the spatial formations of schools. In order to consider participation in the “reproduction of social relations of production – those relations which are constitutive of capitalism ….” (Lefebvre, 1991: 317). The study of these formations is used to better understand how knowledge relates to power. In a very simplistic way those entrusted with the symbolic markers of knowledge are often in hierarchical power structures. As noted earlier, schools often develop hierarchies and power structures as opposed to critical examination of those structures. We must understand space in relation to the practices that produce it. Perceived space is the outcome of personal choices and practices in space or how one might use space. The asylum created the façade of personal space.
The conception of human intelligence developed in the nineteenth century was produced by an ability to repeat its signification through the ordering of bodies in space. Incorporated in the landscape of the asylum and school is the arrangement of power. A space enveloped with ritual, privilege and custom centered on the reinforcement of this power. These topologies are not simply a mapping of social order through spatial arrangement but the uncovering of the production of self-understanding through self-formation.
The asylum: in defense of society
Throughout the nineteenth century the topic of idiocy appeared in academic journals and newspapers (Psycho-Asthenics, 1896). As early as 1850 the US census began collecting statistics on Idiocy, Insanity, and Pauperism (Facts from The Census, 1883). These data were collected, then articulated through newspapers and journals. The sentiment expressed in newspapers encouraged the need for state custodianship of those deemed abnormal in institutions. People were asked to express care for individuals, only through support of this institutional apparatus.
Articles in newspapers detailed the architecture, arrangement and nuances of daily life in asylums. These articles, written throughout the nineteenth century, maintain a fairly cohesive projection of intellectual abnormality. They evoke the notion of a civilized and benevolent state apparatus caring for ‘unfortunate creatures’. These journals and newspapers, however, also presented contrasting views regarding the status of idiocy (Haney, 1899). They suggest advances in science with a growing potential for a treatment of idiocy; yet they simultaneously presented a growing crisis stemming from the inability to control the disorder. This crisis was used to justify the expansion of the asylums.
The institutional annexation included promoting the notion of dangerous idiots which helped people accept the process of confinement. One of the individuals who led the institutional annexation of idiocy in asylums was Édouard Séguin (Séguin, 1870). Referring to his efforts in the development of asylums in Europe, Séguin wrote that his work embodies “an outline of the direction to be given to the scientific efforts of the friends of idiocy and the apostles of universal education” (Séguin, 1866: 2). His efforts occurred as Horace Mann and George Sumner wrote in favor of Séguin and others in Europe developing asylums. Séguin noted that both Mann and Sumner “wrote approvingly, sending over the seeds which soon rose from American soil” (Séguin, 1866: 12). Horace Mann, known as the father of public schools, had studied asylums in Europe extensively (Burrell, 2004: 152). Referring to intellectual abnormality, Séguin wrote with enthusiasm that by 1865 the US had eight “schools, in which nearly one thousand children are constantly in training” (Séguin, 1866: 2). According to Séguin this was only the beginning (Séguin, 1866: 288).
By the mid-nineteenth century several asylums and schools were established with an explicit association to idiocy. In 1851, for example, New York developed an experimental school for idiots that became a state institution. In Pennsylvania in 1852 a school was founded that later became known as the Pennsylvania Training School for Idiots (Annual Report of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children, 1857). One author wrote about the beliefs underlying their development stating that, “The original idea concerning all these institutions was that of an asylum ‘without exposure to violation’ a refuge” (Psycho-Asthenics, 1896: 65). By 1865 similar institutions opened in Connecticut, Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois (Séguin, 1971: 14–15). Many of the institutions started privately as experiments, but later were adopted and funded by the state. By 1891 there were roughly seventy-two asylums in the US.
Asylums and training schools were built with day rooms, chapels, recreation rooms, dormitory space, dining rooms, workrooms and classrooms. These asylums and training schools established separate wards, for example, the acute ward and the epileptic ward. At least one-fourth the inhabitants were to have their own room. The motivation behind this arrangement was to simulate the domains of social life, to create a microcosm of society (Burdett, 1891).
The administration block often formed what was thought to be the rational center or mind of the building. The “more excitable cases” and those individuals deemed least likely to be reformed were situated farthest from the center. In other words, those farthest from the administration were seen as less rational. Corridors and hallways were purposely designed to section-off various locations, disrupting the flow of bodies and designating various spaces with significance and purpose. If the asylums or schools housed both men and women, they were separated with one side for men, and the other for women (Barnard, 1849).
Samuel Howe, in 1848, opened an experimental school to serve as a model for the instruction of those classified as idiots (Howe, 1848). In this school, the young were trained for industry, order and self-respect. Howe’s school and the ones modeled after it promoted the idea that schools, pedagogy and training would relieve families and communities from the burden of idiocy (Howe, 1848). As these schools established legitimacy the forms of classification were multiplied and expanded into wider and wider realms. In 1911 the superintendent for the Massachusetts School for the Feebleminded, Walter E. Fernald wrote: It is now generally understood that the feeble-minded and the progeny of the feeble-minded constitute one of the great social and economic burdens of our modern civilization. We have much accurate knowledge as to the prevalence, causation, social significance, prevention and treatment of feeble-mindedness, its influence as a source of unhappiness to the defective himself and to his family, and its bearing as a causative factor in the production of crime, prostitution, pauperism and other complex social diseases. The literature on the subject has developed to enormous proportions. (Fernald, 1911: 148–149)
The notion of care fashioned in the asylum had a legal power connected to the treatment of individuals. This formation connected the private sphere to the norms of the public/political sphere. Lefebvre notes that training for bureaucratic administration in our own daily lives rationalizes ‘private’ life according to its own standards (Lefebvre, 1971: 159–160). “Bureaucratic conscience is identified with social conscience, and that persuasion turns into compulsion” (Lefebvre, 1971: 159). This compulsion led psychiatry to be legally sanctioned with the protection of society through classification and control of the abnormal. It is through this classification and control that education is made compulsory (Foucault, 2003: 316). The concept of intelligence fashioned in the asylum provided psychiatry with the function of defending society from the abnormal.
The asylum was an abstract space that sought to replicate the private sphere, but was also instrumental in extending institutional power over the private domain. Feeble-mindedness, for example, helped transition the location for the protection of virtue to the private. Subsequently, the family become the very existence of potential danger. It is within this context that a normative system of education becomes a key institution. In this context, the development of a normative system of education intervenes through the concept of loco parentis. The asylums were the initial apparatuses mediating society’s defense but were effectively joined with the development of the public school. The feeble-minded were the primary justification used to connect asylums and schools (Harwood and Allan, 2014: 30–31). They were a threat to apparent normalcy. They were not as easily detected and controlled. This threat gave schools the legal function of screening and classification. Scientists believed that feeblemindedness was inherited as a recessive trait and increasing at a dangerous rate. The New England Journal of Medicine reported: The burden on society resulting from this increase in feeble-mindedness is tremendous. For one thing, persons with subnormal intelligence are always potential criminals …. The financial loss to the country is appalling. Including both the direct cost of supporting these sufferers from mental disease and the loss of productive capacity due to their incompetence … the annual total cost of mental disease for the United States [is] around three-quarters of a billion dollars. (Sofair and Kaldjian, 2000: 312)
The school: a village of the simple
Let the whole colony become a ‘village of the simple’, its inhabitants an industrious, celibate, community … if this plan should be found successful as applied to the feeble-minded, why should it not, with modifications, apply to other classes of degenerates? (Johnson, 1899: 472–473)
For the social scientists of the nineteenth century the asylum presented a conceptual obstacle, in that it portrayed notions of that which is incurable, terminal and custodial. Psychiatrists acknowledged from early on the desire to transcend the conceptual limitations imposed by the asylum. Referring to schools one psychiatrist wrote, “The movement for revision of names is a healthy one and indicates a better understanding of the newer and better purposes of the institutions” (Psycho-Asthenics, 1896: 65). The public schools and ungraded classes became these spaces, symbolic and metaphorical space to convey notions of treatment and progress. The transition in asylums had opened this possibility, but it took a body of knowledge to move beyond the walls of the asylum. In this context, the scientific gaze permeated the public sphere.
The architecture plans for asylums and schools often consisted of symmetrical staggered wings that radiated away from the central administration block (see Figures 1–4). As previously noted men and women were often separated. The style of the building was often neo-Gothic. As with asylums the administration block of schools formed the center of the building, and was considered to be the head or brain of the institution. The outer realms – farthest from the center – of the building were for those least likely to be reformed. As with asylums the corridors and hallways were designed to disrupt the flow of bodies, to create stability as large groups of individuals were seen to create irrationality and chaos (Barnard, 1849).
Michigan Asylum, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Asylums in Buffalo, New York and Topeka, Kansas. The Bronxville School, Bronxville, New York. Ward School-house No. 30, New York City, plan and furniture, 1852.
As early as 1855 architecture manuals used in the construction of public schools state the need to build separate rooms and buildings or ungraded classes for “backward and dull students” (Burrowes, 1855: 12). The primary mode of education or instruction in these classes was manual training. The special classes of New York City began with Public School-1 in Manhattan in 1899 and exist today (Psycho-Asthenics, 1896). The development of the public schools which coincided with ungraded-classrooms was a national phenomenon. As with asylums their numbers grew exponentially. Henry Goddard wrote in reference to the ungraded classes, “fourteen classes in 1906, there were forty-one classes in 1907, sixty-one in 1908, eighty-six in 1909, one hundred and three in 1910, one hundred and twenty-six at the beginning of 1911, and in April, 1912, one hundred and thirty-one (Goddard, 1914: 3).
As with asylums the ungraded classroom whose spatial manifestation was rooted in classification, labeling and arrangement of individuals was employed as a solution to a crisis. An architecture manual suggests, “…it may be well to inquire whether an imperfect system of ungraded Common Schools may not have been the parent, to some extent, of those unrepublican [sic] classes and distinctions, which are becoming more strongly and obviously developed with every year of our progress as a nation, and which must be restrained” (Burrowes, 1855: 12). But, the reasons for the expansion of ungraded classes were generally social and economic. During the Great Depression (1929–1939), for example, when the states stopped issuing work permits that excused children from school, the population of ungraded classrooms in schools rose to record numbers (Richardson and Parker, 1993).
Individuals who were instrumental in the development of public schools in the US suggested that nearly 34 percent of all elementary schoolchildren were “retarded” (Ayres, 1909). These investigations by scientists of the time led to the call for special classes. One of the most significant examples of this was the 10-volume School Efficiency Series, edited by Paul Hanus of Harvard (Hanus, 1913). This series addressed problems of school organization with a focus on a problem that united school administrators, the problem of detecting and classifying mentally defective pupils (Richardson and Parker, 1993: 367–368). The concept of intellectual abnormality was produced by an ability to repeat its own signification in ordering of a body in space. A quote from the New York Times in 1899 states: To provide a course of training for the child of school age who is incapable, by reason of mental infirmity, of profiting by the ordinary course – this is the function of the special class. It is class designed to teach the defective child to labor and to be happy in labor … In short, the special class is one which at a most critical period seeks to help over that child who is on the line of mental insfficiency [sic], thus making a good citizen of him who without such aid would be quite certain to prove a useless or bad one (Haney, 1899: 12).
Lived space: making sense of the asylum and school
Social relations and their discursive counterparts are dependent upon their spatial organization as their underpinning is spatial (Lefebvre, 1991: 404). Subsequently, the study of these spatial relations is necessary to better understand modes of oppression and exploitation in our education system (Ford, 2016: 177). Subsequently, schools should be examined as a site of struggle for representational and symbolic meaning (Lefebvre, 1991). As Lefebvre suggests, it is meaningless to examine the spatial object, the school, as opposed to examining the process of development within the context of struggle. Asylums and schools are sites of struggle for representational and symbolic meaning.
The consideration of this struggle should coincide with deconstruction of discursive formations. The history of human intelligence is a site of struggle. It situated individuals in a perceived natural arrangement. There remains a historical residue in schools where students are conceived to be “needful subjects who must learn self-surveillance so as to monitor and manage unruly emotions to which they would otherwise be held hostage” (Reveley, 2016: 508). Asylums and schools manifested in their spatial arrangement the idea that treatment involved the ordering and structuring of daily life. The prevention of social decay was based on the successful structuring of life.
The concept of human intelligence produced a separation between or concealment of actual lived space and social practices and the discursive and coded practices of the science (Lefebvre, 1991). The necessary approach is to analyze not things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it (Lefebvre, 1991: 89). The asylum operated as a demarcated space, the manifestation of psychiatric knowledge. It was the formation of a space justified by the conception of a relationship between human intelligence and state welfare. The conception of human intelligence shaped institutional manifestations. These spaces have arranged human beings according to perceptions of human intellect. The arrangement of public schools can be examined through the structuring of asylums (Haney, 1899).
Lefebvre writes that “lived space” is divorced from meaning and symbol, or reduced to a simple set of negotiations (Lefebvre, 1991). Lived space includes the routes and networks that link up the places set aside for work, ‘private’ life and leisure (Lefebvre, 1991: 38). Asylums and schools developed networks to mediate connection between the private sphere and the domains of labor and rest. Lefebvre notes that space comes to define routines and daily reality of life (Lefebvre, 1991). This was certainly the case for both asylums and schools.
The concept of human intelligence situated the social body in relation to a perceived natural arrangement. In the asylum and spatial arrangement of schools the ordering of the social body was not independent and random. Rather, the relationship between these institutions and their modes of governance are conditioned through contingent and interdependent modes of knowledge. This knowledge produced a separation between lived space, social practices and the discursive practices of science.
The examination of spatial manifestations associated with intellect and abnormality arranged human beings according to a perceived continuum. Schools and the mode of psychiatry formed in the asylum merged in defense of society. The result was an increasing number of individuals constructed as figures who could not be adequately integrated in the normative system of education. The arrangement of asylums and their justification transcended the domain of normative education and a variety of institutions.
The belief system that allowed the asylum to proliferate coincided with the public-school movement (Burdett, 1891). It accompanied the justification of institutions and legitimacy of compulsory education. According to the science of intelligence, each person embodies an identifiable intellectual potential and social valuation as a distinct and inherent feature. Human beings became inherently connected and yet disconnected. As institutional beings, individuals are situated socially and spatially through the function of discourse that positions the self in relation to others, a relation that often alienates them from others. Inclusion and exclusion were neither inevitable and random, nor born directly of scientific insights for treatment, but rather an organizational principle upon which the topologies of intelligence were manifested.
The space of institutions is divergent in modern society (Lefebvre, 1991: 149). Likewise, the transition in spatial relations shaped by human intelligence is complex and cannot be described as fluid and linear. It was, however, used to divide, classify and arrange individuals spatially in realms of perceived intellectual function.
Conclusion
Specific ideologies are often associated with spatial development, though it is less clear how ideologies are shaped by spatial forms. Additionally, what is relevant for this analysis is why certain social practices formed within these institutions on some level dissipated, but also transformed practices throughout society. Directly related to these phenomena is the less assuring question of what allowed these institutions to operate and function.
A great deal of research focuses on the individual, assessing variations in social outcomes of schooling. This research often overlooks the deeper structural beliefs systems influencing educational practices. Examination of these deeper structural beliefs should coincide with deconstruction of social relations and spatial formations. Lefebvre notes that we need an “approach which would analyze not things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it” (Lefebvre, 1991: 89). Asylums and schools each have their own spatial location, social processes and symbolic meaning. Social space contains symbolic and concealed meaning. The built structures of education are developed with existing subjectivities and modes of being in the world (Ford, 2013: 304). The body of knowledge that allowed intellectual abnormality to function did not emerge as a unified form. It was put together in piecemeal fashion and coincided with a specific spatial organization.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.