ABSTRACT
In England and – as a result of international visits by designers and educationalists and exchanges of the ideas – later in the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of Europe, the decades from the 1930s to the 1970s saw the image of the school child expand to include and embrace freedom of movement, choice of activities and dispositions of isolated quiet concentration, contemplation and thoughtfulness. This reflected new ways of seeing childhood, education and the built environment that established what came to be called a ‘Revolution in Primary Education’ (Clegg 1971). I argue here that discourses of quietness and withdrawal became part of a common vocabulary of design shared by progressive educators and school designers in Britain and other nations seeking to redefine and strengthen democracy against the challenges posed by the development of industrial
capitalism and the rise of Fascism. These discourses, while on the face of it about the control of noise, were less concerned with designing for acoustical variation and more with the exercise of freedom that they believed should be at the heart of the child’s experience of modern schooling. For a time, at a high point of investment in public schooling in England, quiet spaces were thought by some leading designers and educators to be essential components of the built-in variety and educationally driven schools designed for the young child.
