No school system is perfect for all children. This will work for children who could do with more independence and perhaps for children who rise above the norm, because here they are not stuck in a rigid system where all children need to be with others their own age. This system seems to look at the child which is what we should do.

Less is more.

i believe it could wirj for some children who can create structure and direction on their own. but there are some children who require structure and direction from educators, otherwise they won't know what to do. i don't think the age of the children is really a factor.

These pictures are a bit deceptive because there are no teachers shown, but I assume that the teachers regularly interact with groups of children on whatever they are learning. So, perhaps there would not be as much concern about this only appealing to self-motivated students.

Elements of an open classroom approach could be appealing in any school setting - a little more open space, clustering of children in learning activities/groups based on abilities rather than age, and child-centered learning. My son's school uses a bit of these (he's in a K-2 class), but they definitely don't have the type of expansive modern space pictured here. They do, however, have a classroom with colaborative tables (rather than desks), couches for reading/lounging, and lots of outdoor space.

I think it's a neat idea, but I can't help seeing all those shiny surfaces (walls, floors, etc) and thinking that it's probably noisy in there.

This seems like basically the Montessori approach. In my experience, it doesn't work all that well. It's great for kids' self-esteem, but a lot comes down to whether the educational system prepares kids for real life, where they get tested and have to compete. If the Swedes are doing that, this could be a great approach. If they're doing the Montessori approach (no tests), then it's not going to work for a lot of kids down the road when they enter real life.

I went to camp at a school like that. They'd put up partitions because of the noise and distraction. It was still really loud.

I think the photos are a bit misleading, because there generally isn't that much space per child in any school, with or without classrooms.

While a configuration such as this would benefit extroverted learners, it would absolutely hamper any introverted students (such as I). I loathe the group-think style of learning that seems so prevalent in today's classrooms and workplaces. The folks in Sweden should read Quiet by Susan Cain or check out some of the reasearch on introverted people and see that they'd lose at least 50% of the kids in this setting - not to mention those children who act out and distract other children. I'll admit it's asthetically pleasing though.

Poetall I was thinking the exact same thing! This would have been my worst nightmare as a child in elementary school. I am now an elementary school teacher and our school has had to put up temporary walls in our "Open Concept" school that was built in the 70's. It simply does not foster an environment conducive to learning.

I love the space shown in the photos. I agree that introverted children and extroverted children need different spaces, but why schools cannot offer both open space and closed space? Why always just one or the other? I, too, needed a quiet space to learn in when I was a child, but there are other ways to get that than just traditional classrooms. Having some indoor open areas such as shown above and also have some smaller rooms with doors would be perfect, to me.

My daughter is in Montessori and is absolutely thriving. But I agree it doesn't work for every child. She is very self-driven and responsible and always wants to challenge herself. So she is working at her own pace which is wonderful, but constantly moving forward. She's in kindergarten and is very ahead in math (working on 4 digit multiplication), but average for reading (working on basic sight words and sounding out), and a bit behind in handwriting. Every day she has to complete 2 math, 2 reading and 2 handwriting 'work' but she has a lot of choice. But because of who she is, she's constantly trying new and harder things. I do see other kids who don't have that kind of drive who could easily fall behind in a Montessori classroom UNLESS they have a teacher who encourages them to push themselves and stick with harder stuff. So like anything, it comes down to the personality of the student and the teacher. A lot like public school :) Good teachers are worth their weight in gold.

I went to an Open School for high school; open schools are nothing like Montessori.

I'm left wondering how someone could look at these classrooms and a) conclude that it is basically a Montessori classroom, and b) that Montessori doesn't work because of no testing.

Moreover, the Swedish school pictured doesn't look like the traditional concept of an "open school" nor a Montessori; perhaps it is some sort of hybrid. In our open school, we had very large "resource centers" with lots of desks and places to work. Many were for solo work (so no worry about introverts), a fair number allowed pairs to work together, and groups could book seminar rooms. Noise levels were always controlled, and there were always teachers in resource centers. Seminar rooms were used for various units which benefitted from teacher-led learning; for example, as part of the requirements for a unit in English on a particular novel or play, and so forth.

The posters knocking Montessoris have obviously never spent much time in properly accredited Montessori schools or had their children enrolled in one.

This seems like a modern, hip version of a small country school. As I child in the late-1970s I was in a mixed-age class, with clusters of tables for various skill levels, and a single teacher. Kids collaborated and helped each other. Generally it worked. At the time I think it just seemed the logical way to learn, given there were only 7 in my entire year. Maybe it was an avant garde school, but I definitely didn't notice that at the time. It was very old-fashioned in many ways. We did nature rambles, and girls learned knit, while boys did basic carpentry.

I went to a Montessori and then a normal elementry school. I would have loved a school like this to graduate into. I think life would have been much easier and I probably would have been less introverted.

Oh god, yes, Ockeghem, this is totally Monterrori-esque. If I were a parent and my kid's school looked like this, I would turn around and run, not walk.

Where I grew up there were a few schools built according to the Open-Classroom movement that had all been retrofitted with walls. It was apparently impossible to teach or focus with all the noise.

My open-space classroom nightmare involved studying trigonometry with an algebra class on one side and a geometry class on the other. Within three weeks my teacher had found us a small classroom and, finally, we could focus. At the end of the term I transferred to another school.

I don't know if it would work for our society. Sweden is a much smaller country than the US and more people there are inclined to be flexible about education and how children learn and these types of things. The US, not so much. Many people here are close minded about experimenting with education reform, which is why it's taking so long for a complete overhaul of the system. The public can't come to an agreement. In "real life" where children "get tested" is also another reason why the system is so defunct right now. There's so many other things I could say, coming from my own experiences as a teacher.

I agree with ruro though-- we should allow for both types of environment or allow for room for options and flexibility. To the people comparing this to Montessori, please do your research and stop giving Montessori a bad name!

I went to a school, in Germany, that sounds exactly like this, and it was definitely not like Montessori. The aspect of the school I really liked was the social one, because no matter what kind of person you are your always interacting with others, from learning to eating lunch, and a lot of schools don't foster that! I think that one learns a lot from peers, but learning in a class as a whole is really hard! The noise plays a role, so I think if you have a system where you don't need to teach 20+ kids at a time, but can work with them individually or in small groups and have a large enough space to spread out in, it works really well, but if not, it is destined to fail.

What disturbs me about these images is that all the students are passively hooked into a computer screen. Sorry, you cannot convince me that kids can teach themselves critical thinking and writing skills by watching youtube videos or checking facebook, which as an educator with a lot of experience, I guarantee you they are doing. Personally, I would love to ban laptops from my classrooms because even the best students cannot resist the siren call of facebook and become distracted. Yet people continue to believe that handing out macbooks is innovate pedagogy. Ooh, shiny! Hopefully, the magazine selected these photos to show how modern this school is and they do, in fact, have real in-person discussions with their peers and a teacher instead of zoning out with head-phones.
The space is great, though. I do hope there are actual spaces for the kids to interact with teachers and have lectures and discussions.

Just some further info about "open schools"...

As I wrote originally, I went to one of the classic open schools for high school, those opened in the 1970s.

This school seems to push the concept of classlessness far further than those schools, and it bears little resemblance to a true Montessori, sharing only a couple of general concepts (mixed ages, team work), but missing the fundamentals (e.g., materials).

In the open schools, each subject had a "resource center" with teaching materials, books, teachers, and spaces for study. Students would queue to work with a teacher or ask questions when they ran into trouble; noise was never an issue. All testing was done in the testing unit, where there were usually a number of different exams for any given unit.

Each student belonged to a Teacher-Adviser, rather like a home room which you kept for all your years of high school. The TA ensured that you stayed on track with your unit production.

Until the advent of provincial standardized testing, students were able to work at their own pace, and finish courses at their own pace. (It often meant that you could take a far heavier course load than in a normal school -- for example, in grade 12, I took biology, chemistry AND physics, as well as art AND drama; no classes meant no problems fitting everything in.). This flexibility attracted kids who had a lot going on outside of school -- gifted athletes like figure skaters, tennis players, musical prodigies -- because missing school didn't make them fall behind.

The school produced a host of notable alumni -- Olympic and professional athletes, professional musicians, artists, individuals involved in politics, including the current premier of the province of Alberta (it's first woman premier). It wasn't for everybody -- some kids were just not capable of the self-motivation required to succeed. But I think that if you look at the alumni, what impresses you most about them is their self-determination.

Montessori, in my experience, has far more teacher involvement than open schools do. As many schools call themselves a Montessori, and yet lack any accreditation, it is impossible to generalize about them. However, well-run accredited Montessoris produce excellent results.

It's estimated that traditional schools meet the educational styles of about 30% of the school population; it behooves us to find alternatives that better suit the needs of those who do not respond to the methods of traditional public schools.

I'm shocked at all the Montessori-bashing in these comments. There are obviously a lot of misconceptions about Montessori, and it's quite shocking. My eldest daughter attended an accredited Montessori preschool and elementary through 5th grade, where there was no standardized testing but lots of freedom WITHIN the structure, and autonomy was something that was DEVELOPED, not hammered into them. She is now in public middle school in Los Angeles, in 7th grade... and getting straight A's in her Honors classes for the 2nd year in a row, as well as earning awards for her work habits, cooperation, etc., and has great relationships with her teachers. And she took her first standardized CA tests (the CSTs) and her teachers keep congratulating her (and me) for how highly she scored. Where on earth did people get the idea that Montessori isn't for the "real" world? If the "real" world means acting like a lemming and not thinking for yourself, then sure.... but I'm not interested in that kind of "education," and it obviously isn't working for the US to have such mind-numbing institutionalized curriculum. Giving children the freedom to use their bodies and have some freedom to create their day within guidelines is brilliant. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries are at the forefront of what's good for children and families. The US scores poorly. We could learn a lot from their example.

Thank you for saying that, MsChatelaine. As a Montessori parent for 10 years (my girls are now in 7th grade and 3rd grade), my first thought when I saw this photo was "Yay! A classroom without rows of desks and a teacher at the front with a blackboard!" which is part of what makes Montessori work so well. But of course this is NOT a Montessori classroom, and it's tragic how much M-bashing there is going on here. It's tragic that there are apparently so many misconceptions. I really don't know where they come from, and it's highly unfortunate because if the US education system took even a few lessons from the Montessori method, we'd have an incredibly well-thriving population of critical-thinking children and adults. But alas....

For the Montessori-bashers -- read it and weep:

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-mafia/?blog_id=182&post_id=2034

I live next door to this school, most kids seem to really like it, judging by their laughs:)

I'm a teacher, and... meh.

I've been in my job for 28 years, and have seen the pendulum swing from one side ("as long as the kids are engaged in your classroom, I don't care what you're doing") to the other ("standards have sunk to unacceptable levels - the kids have to learn something - let's test the hell out of them to chase those rotten teachers out of the business") and back to the original side again ("if kids feel accepted and nurtured, they'll thrive in their learning environment!").

One thing I know for sure: no one system is perfect, and no one system is the answer to the "problems" facing education. Making kids happy and comfortable is not the same as asking them to learn math. My system has a "happy/comfortable" elementary math program right now ("Everyday Math"), and my 8th grade students regularly freeze up on simplistic problems like 80/40 = 2. They think 1/2 is 0.2, and 1/5 is 0.5. They can't double 13 in their heads - they get the paper out.

My biggest grievance with education is the fact that the practitioners have NO VOICE - the administrators and, to a bigger extent, social fads choose the direction based on trends people have heard about and extremely limited studies. I am constantly told things that my experience shows me are not true, like... group work is the best way (no, in 8th grade, it's a social quagmire for many kids, and must be interspersed with row-time and quiet).

This school looks very pretty and shiny, which means it ought to be copied in numerous places over the next 5 years. Then, I'm guessing, taxpayers will decide that they don't want to fund that level of independence, and will demand that teachers go back to the old way, and probably the teachers who were actually trained in this system will move on, and new teachers with no training will be dumped into the structure, and it will sink under its own weight.

I went to (education) grad school with a girl who went through an "open classroom" school in the late 70s, after the trend was abandoned and before the town could put up a school with walls. She HATED the noise, echoing, distraction, and chaos of the situation.

Lord, spare me from having to teach density in a space where an English teacher is trying to get her kids to write open verse, and a history teacher is trying to teach about the middle ages.

Wow, this school looks amazing for children with suitable learning styles. My daughter is at an earthier kindergarten version of this here in Denmark and thriving, learning and blossoming in a way she didn't in a traditional kindergarten in our previous country of residence. By no coindidence, the Scandinavian countries are at the forefront of liberalism AND education, not to mention design and creative thinking. Pretty exciting stuff considering the precarious future of our species. What confuses me is, why would anyone in this forum berate this school? No one's imposing it on any of you - or anyone else for that matter. Does every school and every child have to fit a mold? Vive la différence!

PS, How is anyone inferring that this is a Montessori school? Sure doesn't look like one to me.

Not so much worried about the noise as about the lack of privacy. Where is there a space for a child to work alone? There are no separate rooms, no alcoves, not even a cubbyhole. This design makes it possible for anyone to interrupt any student anywhere. But creativity, poetry, and the reflection necessary for a deep character are all solitary activities. There are more shining surfaces here than in the Panopticon, but I fear it would have the same effect.

I don't remember a lot of private spaces in the traditional classroom either. If you were lucky you might be able to hide out a bit at the back of the classroom but that was where the troublemakers usually hung out until dragged up to the front where the teacher could keep an eye on them. There was always the danger you could be identified as a troublemaker too if the teacher turned around just as you were being dragged into some unwillng interaction. I may or may not have liked an open classroom but there was no choice in any school I went to. It makes sense to have both open and more private spaces available and a flexibility in the spaces to make more configurations possible according to the needs of the class. It makes no sense however to have the noise of one class interfere with the activities of another.

Dame Julian --

If you look at pictures 2 and 3 above, you'll note that the chalk paint covered little house is indeed a separate room (it may be that those are pictures of 2 separate rooms). If you klick on the related link, you will see that there are many little cubbyholes for kids to squirrel into and work. Here's more information about the available learning spaces from the school's own web site:

http://vittra.se/english/Schools/StockholmSouth/Telefonplan/LearningSpaces.aspx

What I was trying to get at in my posts about my personal experience in an open school is that there are many cultural and organizational ways of managing kids in this space that we can't see in mere pictures. Answers need to come directly from teachers and students and it is unfair for us to judge in absence of that information.

All the criticism coming from posters about open schools are either based on secondhand information or assumptions. The "open school" movement was not always literally about having no walls, but about doing away with classes and making learning more flexible and responsive to student needs. Different schools may have interpreted the concept different ways, so sweeping criticisms are neither fair not accurate. I would not base my understanding of open classrooms solely on the wikipedia entry cited here because it is weak and not comprehensive. But even this wikipedia entry implies degrees of openness.

And --

Lord spare me and my children from jaded and cynical educators.

haha, while I'm not sure all the philosophies about "open school", my elementary school had no walls, just moveable partitions. cool in theory, and nice in practice, as teachers could make their rooms smaller or bigger each year, and it really wasn't that bad, however to this day, we still laugh about "six inch voices" and "heritage claps"... the name of our school was Heritage, and we had to clap using two fingers on each hand, so as not to be "too loud", and we practically had to whisper all the time. sigh :)

I think this is a fantastic idea. I'd love to enroll a child in this type of learing environment. I thrived in the traditional setting of American public schools.. separated classrooms, basic coursework with AP classes, yada yada.. but felt underwhelmed every year leading to university. This would have been thrilling to me, to interact with swaths of people outside my age group on a daily basis. I would need to be guided away from history lessons at that time, but I digress, a specific kind of educator/teacher would need a motivated student for this type of schooling to work.

Shame on all of you for bashing Montessori schools, and the commenters immediately writing this idea off. Children are not all alike and neither should be their education. Adopting alternative forms of learning should be practiced to better educate our evolving future.

@mschatelaine:

Veteran lawyers train new lawyers. Veteran brain surgeons are in demand for brain surgery. Only in teaching does voicing the knowledge you've gained over years of experience get you written off as "jaded and cynical."

If you came to my classroom, you'd see kids engaged in learning visually, kinesthetically, in groups and individually. We do writing, and reading, and talking. We give speeches, we hold balloons in our hands, we build tops from CDs and nuts and bolts, we navigate the school grounds with GPS units in our hands. All lessons I've developed and perfected myself. All my principals have told me that they consider me one of the most qualified educators in their buildings. My favorite compliment from a boss: "You're the real thing. Other teachers talk a good game, but you actually do it."

I am an optimist about chidren and their potential. I am an optimist about their ability to reach great heights when given a good environment.

And yet, and yet - all that I said in my previous post is true. Trends and fads are the one certain thing in teaching - and the trend you rode in on in your 20s is guaranteed to be the one the people dismiss as rubbish when you're in your late 30s. The best a teacher can do is learn to take a grain from this fad and a snippet from that one - and incorporate these ideas into a lifelong educational philosophy that best allows KIDS TO LEARN.

You cannot be in education more than 8 years before you see the latest "education-saving" initiative be jettisoned in favor of a shinier one. Seeing that doesn't make teachers cynical: it just makes them not blind. Parents may be spared knowing about this - but that doesn't mean it's not real and true.

A proper open classroom needs a fair amount of space and well-trained and enthusiastic teacher to manage it - there should be lots of quiet spaces to get work done. I think if you put kids in badly designed classrooms with teachers who were trained to teach in a different environment, you might get crappy results, regardless of the specific educational philosophy.

This school looks lovely, not unlike a really nice building at some of our more elite colleges. Wish we had the funding here for that!

@Mschatelaine: "Lord spare me and my children from jaded and cynical educators."

Jaded and cynical because education is a political football. Because teachers are made to jump through hoops instead of being trusted to do the job that they are trained for. Because, as @Mary B C rightly pointed out, and the above comment illustrates, experienced educators are not afforded the same respect as other skilled professionals. Why is this? Having gone through the education system, and having kids might qualify you to have an opinion about teaching and learning, but not to dismiss educators who hold different opinions to you as jaded and cynical.