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105 4 b u i l D i n g C r e a t i v i t y i n P O s t w a r s C h O O l s T H E R I S I n G P o P U L A T I o n of young American children made school building , together with housing, the most widely discussed architectural challenge after World War II. High prices and scarcity of materials during the Depression and wartime had left few possibilities for renovating or even maintaining older structures, much less constructing new schools. Furthermore , the population migration to areas in the West and to developing suburban towns created a need where there was little existing provision for school-age children and nothing that could match their ever-growing numbers.1 Enrollment in U.S. elementary and secondary schools was 25.1 million during the 1949–50 school year. By 1959–60, it had increased by almost 11 million, and it peaked in 1970 at 51.3 million.2 The surge of new births that began during wartime meant that at the end of the war the demand for new classrooms collided with an outdated, limited stock of school buildings.3 In 1955, editors at the Architectural Forum worried, “Every 15 minutes enough babies are born to fill another classroom and we are already 250,000 classrooms behind.”4 To deal with the shortage of school seats, children often attended school in split sessions using overcrowded classrooms, rundown buildings, or hastily built temporary quarters. Even a small district estimated that a new classroom had to be ready for occupancy every third day of the year just to keep up with fresh enrollments.5 Thousands of public schools were built to meet postwar needs. The designs, plans, materials , and furnishings of these buildings reflect the endurance of debates on creativity and imagination at a time of growing concern over the state of American education.6 The public school, as an agent for national renewal and the cultivation of democracy, has long been a cultural symbol of American aspiration. After World War II, the implications of public education gained increased BuIldInG crE AtIVIt y In P oSt wAr SchoolS 106 significance with the rising birthrate and the growing specter of a communist threat. As the Cold War enhanced nationalist anxieties, it placed new attention on education and creating a competitive edge in American children . These forces, together with shifting educational ideals that emphasized personality, creativity, and citizenship, had a profound effect on the mission and design of postwar schools. Behind the architectural changes to the school plant and classroom lay the increasing acceptance of modern design and methods of “modern teaching” as means of helping children learn in ways that might stimulate their attention and their imagination. Architects and educators argued that young children should be offered ways of expressing their own desires in order to develop the creative impulses that, they reasoned, would provide a firm basis for academic skills at a later stage. As pedagogical theory and architectural design became closely intertwined, debates on the role of the school and its design made discussions about space, materials, and pedagogy the business of thousands of school board members, local elected officials, architects, designers, and parents. The modern American public school, as a cultural and architectural form, emerged from a complex interaction of technical concerns, educational theory, and the larger historical forces of postwar expansion and Cold War tension. I argue that the material qualities of the new schools— from the plan and materials to decoration and furnishings—were devised in dialogue with educational progressivism that was resurgent in American school-building campaigns after World War II. This evidence counters a popular belief that progressivism collapsed in the face of Cold War conformity . Instead, the discourse of creativity was written into the programs and plans of both elementary and high schools. These buildings achieved notoriety as a set of ideas. They were created primarily for white, middleclass children, yet they were promoted as model solutions to a nationwide crisis. Architects, educators, and manufacturers, together with local school board members, created a popularly disseminated image of school bound to ideal methods of building and learning, and a persistently romantic notion of the creative child. Prewar sChools and The ProgressIve Ideal As architects faced the problem of designing new school buildings, they quickly rejected the multistory structures from earlier school-building campaigns . Nineteenth-century American schoolhouses...

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