ABSTRACT
The traditional arrangement of desks in school classrooms symbolizes both the extreme helplessness of the dependent basic assumption and the extreme antagonism of the fight-flight basic assumption. As long as the teacher accepts the role of the dependent leader and is being looked up to as infallible, his position in front of the class, with a table that looks different from the pupils’ desks, emphasizes their submissiveness and his own remoteness and unreality; as soon as the culture changes, when the group finds a fight leader or retreats into hostile apathy, the antagonism is, in its turn, symbolized by the battle array of desks over and against the teacher. When I see a student with an over dependent, hostile or apathetic class, I find myself wondering whether some change in the visual pattern of the room might not help him to bring about a corresponding change in the relationship. For as soon as the class is seated with the teacher in a pattern that emphasizes their mutual relationship, two things are likely to happen: it becomes less and less easy for the children to act as if the teacher were a wooden figure without any feelings to consider; and it becomes less and less easy for the teacher to act as if the children had no initiative or imagination to be brought into play.
