“Schools should be the most beautiful place in every town and village,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be barred from going to school the following day.”
Universities have figured this out; high schools, largely, have not.
When I went to university several decades ago, if you saw a large tree, it was because God put it there. Our library was lovingly nicknamed “the ugliest building in the Western Hemisphere,” which was a fair assessment, since it resembled the old, rectangular steel cheese graters your mother had in her kitchen when you were young.
My junior year in university, the new library opened. The contemporary design was inspiring, including suites of individual study rooms on the fifth floor, which faced downtown. At night, the view of the city lights was elegant and inspiring.
I discovered this space earlier than most, and adjusted my study hours a bit later, to take advantage of the view. I remember sitting there, excited to study in such a space. (That view did a lot of the heavy lifting for my course in “Russian History: 1500-1916”.)
I eventually got pushed out of the room with a view by an overwhelmed reservation system of students chasing beautiful spaces. The architect and university got right what interior designer Chaudry Ghafoor defines as a successful room, one which: “isn’t defined by what it’s called, but by what it makes you want to do. Does this room make me want to – and make it easy to – do what this room is designed to do? An office or library should make you want to study merely by entering the space.”
Decades later, having returned to my alma mater, it is clear that millions of dollars have been spent on architecture, landscaping, and design. There are trees there other than those God planted, and the campus is simply beautiful in every way.
After 36 years of teaching in public high schools, I recently retired and took a job at a liberal arts university. Walking the campus and contrasting it with high schools, an observation emerges. Not only is the university landscaping lush and the campus quiet, but the architecture itself is designed to continually encourage sitting, talking, planning, and reflecting. Every few dozen yards there is another seating area: tables with chairs, benches under trees, patio tables under umbrellas, reading nooks by windows. Spaces for you to stop, sit, talk, and think.
Spaces for collaboration, spaces for contemplation, spaces for inspiration.
While the aesthetics of many high schools, especially the newer ones, have improved, the architecture is too often full of right angles, a shape that doesn’t appear much in nature.
Long corridors with no breaks; no place to sit; no place to talk; no place to set a cup of coffee and greet a colleague. Instead, the hallways are designed to move you along: Do not stop. Do not congregate. Do not contemplate.
There’s no beauty to be seen here. Get to class!
I’m not suggesting that high schools have the capacity to elevate the aesthetics and have chosen not to. I’m instead suggesting that aesthetics, and its effect on the human soul, rarely seems important. We paint the walls institutional beige, march students in straight columns, turn them at right angles, and soon wonder where that divine spark has gone.
We know from research in hospitals that patients who have a beautiful view or have a garden to walk in require less pain medication and recover more quickly. If you’ve been in hospitals in recent years, you’ve probably noticed dramatic changes in architecture, design, and aesthetics compared to hospitals built four or more decades ago. They actually feel good to be in!
Older hospitals emanate the complaint of our ancestors: Hospitals are where you go to die. While you may physically survive the old, ugly, sterile (in design) hospitals, your soul is bruised in the process. You do not long to return, in the way you might a museum.
When the British House of Commons was destroyed in WWII by a German air raid, Winston Churchill argued that Parliament should be reconstructed in the previous rectangular, face-to-face design rather than, as some were suggesting, a modern semi-circular layout.
Churchill believed that the two-party system benefited from the tight, intimate quarters of the original design. “We shape our buildings,” Churchill said, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Most high schools segregate subjects by hallway, universities often separate their departments by buildings, ensuring that no collaboration will occur naturally. These design choices keep knowledge siloed, keep scholars separated, and increase the likelihood of students wondering what all these subjects have to do with each other.
Scholar John Ruskin wrote in 1851, “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.”
Ruskin’s quote is often interpreted to mean we should appreciate beauty for its own sake and not expect it to serve a utilitarian function. Perhaps, but beauty existing for its own sake is utilitarian, and its function is to improve the human soul.
In design, we have allowed our portrayal of beauty in everyday life to be replaced by cheap facsimiles of the real thing. Common things like downspouts, streetlamps, and door hinges used to be crafted. They are now manufactured. Cheaper, to be sure, but at what cost? As beauty is sterilized from public spaces, it becomes sequestered in private enclaves.
Perhaps we have overshot Louis Sullivan’s advice that “form follows function,” with minimalism reducing buildings of major cities to a certain uniformity, seemingly erasing culture, time and space, replacing them with a smooth glass exterior. When all elements are designed as simply as possible, to what do we lift our eyes in awe?
Author Jim Sleeper recounts a story that shows the effect beauty can have, originally told by a public-school teacher taking a group of inner-city children on a bus trip out of their neighborhood:
As the school bus crossed a bridge over the river on its way out of the city, the inner-city students erupted into wild cheers. When the teacher asked what they were celebrating, she discovered that many of the children had never seen a natural river before in their lives—only concrete, asphalt, and city blocks.
Concrete, asphalt, and city blocks have an effect on the soul; so does a beautiful river.
Even worse than being deprived of a beautiful environment due to economic circumstances is to have a beautiful environment available and then refuse to use it.
In his essay “The Closing of the Museum Mind” (2019), Mark Bauerlein wrote:
A few years ago, the head of a major art museum in the Midwest proudly explained to me a change in the institution’s approach to school field trips. In the past, buses dropped the children off at the grand front entrance, where they walked up a sweeping flight of stone steps, passed through massive bronze doors, and entered a soaring, marble-columned rotunda.
But museum leadership decided this entrance was ‘too intimidating’ for inner-city children. It sent a message of elitism and exclusion, they believed. And so, the museum rerouted the student groups to a side entrance near the parking lot—a low-ceilinged, modern glass door that led straight into an orientation room with plastic chairs and colorful signage.
What the director saw as an act of empathy and inclusion was, in reality, a profound act of condescension. The grand entrance was not built to exclude children; it was built to inspire them—to signal that they were stepping out of the ordinary, mundane world and into a space dedicated to human greatness. By ushering them through the side door, the museum stripped away the wonder before the kids even set foot inside.
Museum leadership had a chance to deliver the sublime and decided that the kids couldn’t handle it. Another way of saying that is they did not think the kids were worthy of it. Hiding beauty behind accessibility deprives the downtrodden, but apparently, it’s for their own good. The museum happily serves the sublime to the well-heeled and wealthy, but not to the youth. Who could deprive children of such beauty?
To have never gotten to walk up the steps through the big pillars! In doing so, the kids might have been transformed; they might have taken some of that beauty and awe back to the concrete and asphalt where they live, and begin to wonder how they can shape their own environment to feel that way again. “The beautiful is as useful as the useful,” Victor Hugo wrote, “Perhaps more so.”
How we shape our environment, design our buildings, and arrange our interiors is a selective recreation of what elements we choose to value, in hope that we can recreate and grow those values. In this way, we enable our environment to transfer certain virtues to people themselves.
In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates recounts what the priestess Diotima taught about the nature of ‘eros.’ On Diotima’s ladder of love, the first rung channels erotic energy into useful and civil refinement of the soul and society. The next rung ties eros to spiritual loveliness, the next ties that to the love of beautiful institutions, the next to knowledge, and finally Diotima ties knowledge to the contemplation of Beauty itself. In this way, we refine not only the individual soul, but society at large.
Dostoevsky wrote that “Beauty will save the world.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Nobel lecture on literature, explained Dostoevsky’s quote this way:
And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.
Oh, to contemplate that paragraph with colleagues, sitting in the sky-terrace overlooking downtown, sitting on a bench in the shade of an oak tree, or sitting with a student in one of those window-lit nooks. In such spaces, contemplating such topics, our bruised souls are restored.
Dostoevsky was right. Beauty will save the world. If only we would let it.
