  urlLink Back to the Agora: Workable Solutions for Small Urban School Facilities. ERIC Digest. This ERIC Digest is by Barbara Kent Lawrence.
From the ERIC Digest: Two preconceptions make providing facilities for small schools a challenge: that they will be more expensive per student than facilities for large schools, and that teaching and learning must occur in isolation from the community. Yet Socrates taught in the "agora," an open market in ancient Athens, which, like the Roman "forum," functioned as a marketplace for ideas and commerce. For students and teachers it offered an ideal place in which to learn and teach. This Digest suggests adapting such a model to meet modern needs, and shows that there are successful small schools that have already done so while reducing costs. Several successful and innovative small urban schools (discussed below) have created places that are the modern equivalent of the agora, places where students and adults can interact with the community, share resources, and learn from each other.
Such school designs can be "courageously evolutionary--not just astoundingly revolutionary" (Bergsagel, 2002, p. 1). In a foresighted report, researchers DeArmond, Taggart, and Hill (2002, p. 5) identified five trends of education that should guide decisions about facilities: "pressure on schools to perform for all students, .
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demands for the personalization of learning, new technologies, periodic shortages of teachers, and shifts in student population and residency patterns. " These pressures may require that school facilities be reconfigured in creative and innovative ways. DeArmond et al. suggest that "facilities should focus on students' learning and achievement .
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be flexible .
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be responsive .
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trade-offs and choices should be transparent .
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provisions should be driven by data, and facilities should be economically efficient" (DeArmond et al., p. 13). How can the ideas of the ancient Greeks and modern researchers in education apply to school facilities? 
