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“Fleeting pockets of anarchy”:

Streetwork. The exploding school
a
Catherine Burke
a
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK
Published online: 11 Jun 2014.

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exploding school, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 50:4,
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 Paedagogica Historica, 2014
Vol. 50, No. 4, 433–442, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2014.899376

“Fleeting pockets of anarchy”: Streetwork. The exploding school

Catherine Burke*

Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

(Received 13 February 2014; accepted 25 February 2014)

Colin Ward (1924–2010) was an anarchist and educator who, together with
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Anthony Fyson, was employed as education officer for the Town and Country
Planning Association in the UK during the 1970s. He is best known for his two
books about childhood, The Child in the City (1978) and The Child in the
Country (1988). The book he co-authored with Fyson, Streetwork. The
Exploding School (1973), is discussed in this article as illustrating in practical
and theoretical terms Ward’s appreciation of the school as a potential site for
extraordinary radical change in relations between pupils and teachers and schools
and their localities. The article explores the book alongside the Bulletin of Envi-
ronmental Education, which Ward edited throughout the 1970s. It argues that
the literary and visual images employed in the book and the bulletins contributed
to the powerful positive representation of the school as a site of potential radical
social change. Finally, it suggests that “fleeting pockets of anarchy” continue to
exist in the lives of children through social networking and virtual environments
that continue to offer pedagogical possibilities for the imaginative pedagogue.
Keywords: Ward; anarchism; radical pedagogy; environmental education; urban

In 1971 two teachers, Colin Ward and Tony Fyson, were appointed “straight from the
classroom” to the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and proceeded to
invent a new curriculum subject for schools: environmental education.1 Ward had
worked in architecture for many years before training as a teacher at Garnett College,
London. Before moving to the TCPA, he lectured in liberal studies at Wandsworth
Technical College. This was in the “golden era” of the TCPA, and they went on to
produce “a high-profile, high-intensity project that is still recalled with affection and
admiration for pointing to new ways of environmental understanding”.2 Streetwork.
The Exploding School was published in 1973 and in it the authors set out their vision
of education celebrating autonomy, mutuality and engaged citizenship. The book
declared its purpose as being to illustrate and promote “the explosion of the school
into the urban environment”.3 It is impossible to read the text today without reference
to the more recent context of theories and practices that have been developed around
pupil voice, pupil participation, consultation and place-based education more
generally. This is because Streetwork envisaged children and young people as

*Email: cb552@cam.ac.uk
1
The original impetus came from TCPA Director David Hall and his then TCPA Chairman
Maurice Ash, who also presided over Dartington School at the time.
2
D. Hardy (1999) Tomorrow and Tomorrow. The TCPA’s first hundred years, and the
next. p. 14, http://www.tcpa.org.uk/data/files/18991999.pdf (accessed March 19, 2014)
3
Streetwork, back cover.
© 2014 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
 434 C. Burke

positive resources of and for their communities, which were understood to be richly
ever-changing, dynamic forums of interactions between people, places and things.4
Reading the text today, one is continually confronted with a sense of familiarity – a
reminder of the social value of including pupils in the design of their education, and
the limitations of the modern school to provide for that – but also with an agenda that
appears to be far more radical than more recent pupil voice work, since it visualises
an education without school as most people would recognise it.5
Apart from education and childhood, Ward wrote about many other aspects of
modern urban life, and he applied much critical attention to town planning and
housing policy. He also wrote about anarchism in ways that framed it as a respect-
able characteristic of human behaviour that inevitably flourished under conditions of
freedom.6 Ward was less convinced of the necessity to divide the young from the
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old in conceptual or practical terms and saw much more that was universal across
the generations than that was age-specific. Using his considerable talent for critical
writing to illuminate the human proclivity for small collective acts and interventions
that produce creative solutions to pressing needs, problems or desires, Ward sought
to gently reveal what he described as “those fleeting pockets of anarchy that occur
in daily life”7 by drawing attention to everyday experiences as people (adults and
children) inevitably interacted with their immediate environments. In Streetwork,
these encounters were critically translated via a pedagogic lens that imagined rich
reservoirs of educational possibilities in the everyday. This article will situate Street-
work in the context of Colin Ward’s own engagement with radical educational
thought and practices; discuss Ward’s and Fyson’s understanding of anarchism as
expressed in examples of action envisaged in the text and exemplified through the
Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE); and consider the question of how far
this view of the child as a maker and shaper of their world was a precursor for sub-
sequent interest in engaging children in participatory initiatives in education.

The context of Streetwork. The Exploding School

Colin Ward’s influences were historical and global. He drew inspiration from
eighteenth and nineteenth-century dissenters and anarchists from the British Isles as
well as from other parts of Europe and America. He was an admirer of his contempo-
raries Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich, advocates of critical pedagogy and deschooling.
The latter was for Ward a personal project: having left school at 15, he began his
education seriously thereafter, ever following his curious mind. He discovered anar-
chism as a young serviceman during the Second World War and, through his eclectic
and extensive reading, assembled a lifelong band of literary companions – among
them Peter Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes and Paul Goodman – who had in their own
lives and writing thrown light on the capacity of humankind to educate and organise
itself, resisting and sometimes defeating the destructive forces of national
4
For a very useful critique of place-based-education theories, see Jan Nespor, “Education and
Place: A Review Essay,” Educational Theory 58, no. 4 (2008): 475–89.
5
C. Ward and A. Fyson, Streetwork. The Exploding School (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1973).
6
For example, see C. Ward, Housing, an Anarchist Approach (London: Freedom Press,
1976); C. Ward, Cotters and Squatters. The Hidden History of Housing (Nottingham: Five
Leaves Press, 2002).
7
The term “fleeting pockets of anarchy” is from Carl Levy, “Colin Ward (1924–2010),”
Anarchist Studies 19, no. 2 (2011): 13.
 Paedagogica Historica 435

governments.8 Paul Goodman’s work had particular relevance to the development of

ideas expressed in Streetwork. Through his fiction, Goodman developed the idea of
the “exploding school” which realised the city as an educator. Playing with the
notion of the school trip as traditionally envisaged, he created an image of city streets
as host to a multitude of small peripatetic groups of young scholars and their adult
shepherds. This image was powerfully expressed in Goodman’s 1942 novel, The
Grand Piano; or, The Almanac of Alienation.9 Ward quotes extensively from this
novel in Streetwork because the imagery and vocabulary so clearly articulate a view
of the city and the school that is playfully subversive yet imaginable. In a dialogue
between a street urchin and a professor, Goodman has the elder explain:
this city is the only one you’ll ever have and you’ve got to make the best of it. On the
other hand, if you want to make the best of it, you’ve got to be able to criticize it and
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change it and circumvent it . . . Instead of bringing imitation bits of the city into a
school building, let’s go at our own pace and get out among the real things. What I
envisage is gangs of half a dozen starting at nine or ten years old, roving the Empire
City (NY) with a shepherd empowered to protect them, and accumulating experiences
tempered to their powers . . . In order to acquire and preserve a habit of freedom, a kid
must learn to circumvent it and sabotage it at any needful point as occasion arises . . .
if you persist in honest service, you will soon be engaging in sabotage.10
Inspired by such envisaged possibilities, Ward came to his own view of anarchism,
childhood and education. Sabotage was a function of the transformational nature of
education when inculcated by the essential elements of critical pedagogy. In this
sense, anarchism was not some future utopian state arrived at through a once-and-
for-all, transformative act of revolution; it was rather a present-tense thing, always-
already “there” as a thread of social life, subversive by its very nature – one of
inhabiting pockets of resistance, questioning, obstructing; its existence traceable
through attentive analysis of its myriad ways and forms.
Colin Ward was a classic autodidact who sought connections between fields of
knowledge around which academic fences are too often constructed. At the heart of
his many enthusiasms was an interest in the meaning and making of space and
place, as sites for creativity and learning. As Ward himself put it, it was when he
encountered the work of Patrick Geddes, via Lewis Mumford, that his own de-
schooling and re-education commenced. It was a process through which the familiar
became strange, revealing within it the half-realised potential of another way of liv-
ing and seeing. The Outlook Tower, reconstructed by Geddes in 1890s Edinburgh,
represented both the symbolic and the literal point from which such a perspective
became possible. It stood high above the city and held within it a camera obscura,
which was utilised by Geddes to offer a new view of Edinburgh in its relationship
with the region and the ocean that surrounded it. A physical structure with a camera
at its heart, enabling contemporary citizens to see their city in an extraordinary,
ever-changing light, it was an early example of the power of visual technologies to
challenge the normal optics of daily life, in creating something that was an educa-
tional device, a planning tool and an invitation to citizenly debate. Rising above the
city, it was also, for Ward, a reminder of the importance of the need to transcend
any kind of political, nationalistic or religious separatism.
8
Colin Ward, Influences. Voices of Creative Dissent (Bideford: Green Books, 1991).
9
Paul Goodman, The Grand Piano (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1942).
10
Goodman’s dialogue between a street urchin and a professor in The Grand Piano, quoted
in Ward and Fyson, Streetwork, p. 18.
 436 C. Burke

In Streetwork and in the many articles Ward wrote for the BEE, Ward and Fyson
evidenced and illustrated a view of the child in urban streets as purposeful, ener-
getic, determined and engaged in positive community decision-making and develop-
ment. This view of the child and young person chimed exactly with John Holt’s
argument in Escape from Childhood (published around the same time) that even
young children were capable of contributing to the building of communities. But this
was a counterpoint to the dominant, popular and reassuring image of teachers and
pupils tucked away for the majority of most days within the school building, set
apart from the community.11
Why was the absence of children of school age from town and city streets so
easily taken for granted? (And why was their occasional presence so often seen as
troublesome?) The answer is, of course, that since the end of the nineteenth century,
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the state had given school the responsibility of removing children from the everyday
environment until they were judged as, having been equipped by the education they
received, fit to be released into it. But how might adults facilitate processes through
which children came into direct, questioning contact with the significance of objects,
places and things during their childhood years? In the context of the early 1970s
there was plenty of evidence that teachers could be relied upon to experiment and
innovate and, just about, take risks in their practice, although in Streetwork the
authors note how difficult this was becoming. Therefore it is understandable that
Ward and Fyson, in their formal positions as Education Officers at TCPU, turned
their attention in the direction of formal institutions and to the possibilities of con-
structive work around and with them. Ward devoted nine years of practical experi-
ment and advocacy to his work on the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE),
published between 1971 and 1980. His bulletin articles impress the reader – always
intended to be a teacher in a school – with their practical optimism about the possi-
bilities of Streetwork and the “exploding school”.
Some examples from the BEE are necessary to illustrate this. Unlike Streetwork,
the BEE was roughly produced and highly illustrated and the images carried in
every issue were not insignificant. The images and captions were a powerful means
of encouraging the educational imagination, literally placing pupils and their teach-
ers within the context of an urban environment, always in purposeful ways. The
front cover of the 1973 paperback edition of Streetwork contains an image of young
people that appeared on the cover of the BEE in March 1972. The photographer was
Bob Bray and the image showed a group of pupils taking to the streets with what
look like pet goats. The story accompanying the image was about the question of
whether or not pupils and teachers were insured to take children out of school.
Ward wrote as if change was always possible and was in this perhaps spurred on
by a fierce emerging counter-argument proposed by powerful voices from the politi-
cal and cultural establishment, who sought to trivialise any pedagogies associated
with what became labelled as “discovery learning” and demonise its advocates. The
impact of the Black Papers (1969–1977), James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech
(1976) and successive Conservative governments (1979–97) might at first sight
appear decisive. They created the conditions in which the BEE came to an end.
Nevertheless, if school, as re-constituted in England and Wales after 1988, was
unable to allow the full potential of Streetwork and environmental education to be

11
J.C. Holt, Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (Boston: E. P.
Dutton, 1974). For a list of articles by Ward published in the BEE, see Appendix 1.
 Paedagogica Historica 437

realised in the ways that Ward and his colleagues at the BEE had wanted, the ideas
survived regardless, carried forward by untold numbers of teachers, adult educators,
playworkers, artists, designers, architects and others – some of whom have contrib-
uted to the publication of a collection of essays on the influence of Ward’s ideas and
writing about childhood, education and environment.12
Ken Jones situates Ward’s 1970s writing, including Streetwork and that in the
BEE, within the context of a range of radical experiments and probings which,
during the 1960s and 1970s in England and the US, created niches and openings for
change within and against the state system. He posits that for a century, structures of
schooling, while contingent, still appeared to offer opportunities to teachers for
experimentation – something that Ward documented and admired – until the impact
of the 1988 Educational Reform Act and its encouragement of conformity. But as
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early as the early 1970s, Ward and Fyson had discussed in Streetwork the prevailing
practical, legal and cultural restrictions on teachers that prevented them operating
“like Athenian pagagogues”,13 roaming the city streets with their small groups of
pupils. The very best opportunities to take off into the streets, they suggested, were
almost always spontaneous, when pupils and teachers realised together a sudden a
pressing need to see, know and understand. However, professional teachers were
(and are) inhibited from acting in such ways, and therefore Streetwork acknowl-
edged that careful and meticulous planning must be a partner of real engagement.
Ward’s Chapter 4, “Up and down the escalator”, confronts the difficult challenges
for teachers who might wish to use the city as a resource for learning, but he never-
theless, characteristically, drives through an optimistic and positive argument rooted
in real stories of resistance in and against the system. Ward remarks on such exam-
ples of what he calls “techniques for involvement” as “devices for developing the
habit of observation, the habit of evaluating, and the habit of questioning decisions
in the environment”.14 In this emphasis on habit-forming education, we hear an echo
of Paul Goodman’s professor in The Grand Piano.
The Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) reinforced teachers’ already evident
reluctance to take children out of schools to further their education and broaden their
experiences. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
(UNCRC), signed by the majority of nation states, has proven to be a very powerful
mechanism that has shifted a view of childhood from a legally ambiguous zone to
one fundamentally protected and valued by the state (although the Convention is a
statement of intent rather than a legal guarantee). This is universally recognised as a
good thing and has provided a firm foundation for subsequent pupil consultation
and voice work. However, what Streetwork offers is something different. It offers a
view of the natural inclination of children and young people to not only have a view
and a voice when adults deem to consult them, but also to critique, re-imagine and
reconstruct their world for themselves with and for the communities to which,
through so acting, they would (it was believed) experience a greater sense of belong-
ing and therefore continued commitment. It also offers a dynamic view of

12
Catherine Burke and Ken Jones, eds., Education, Childhood and Anarchism. Talking Colin
Ward (London: Routledge, 2014).
13
Colin Ward and Anthony Fyson, Streetwork. The exploding school (London: Routledge,
1973), 19.
14
Ward, in Streetwork, 32.
 Downloaded by [UGR-BTCA Gral Universitaria] at 04:51 05 March 2015

438
C. Burke

Figure 1. Front cover of the BEE, March 1972.

 Paedagogica Historica 439
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Figure 2. Front cover of the book Streetwork, 1973.

place-based education that encourages the questioning of place, recognising it not so

much as a fixed abode but rather as always subject to negotiation and change.
Streetwork is an important reminder not only of the rich resource and continuing
relevance offered by Ward’s collective writing about childhood and education, but
also of how school communities were, at the time of its publication, imagined as
 440 C. Burke

resources for helping to bring about social change. The text is also a reminder that
the anarchist characteristic of freedom to roam and determine one’s learning path
was regarded as literally possible through peripatetic wandering, but always within a
purposeful and structured framing of pedagogic intent.

Fleeting pockets of anarchy and spaces of educational opportunity

The historian of childhood John Gillis has borrowed the notion of the “islanding of
children” from Helgar and Hartmut Zeiher as a metaphor to describe how contempo-
rary children relate, or do not relate, to the urban environments that they experience
in growing up. Gillis quotes the geographer David Harvey, who has noted that chil-
dren could even be seen to inhabit islands within islands, while “the internal spatial
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ordering of the island strictly regulates and controls the possibility of social change
and history”. This could so easily be describing the modern school. According to
Gillis, “archipelagoes of children provide a reassuring image of stasis for mainlands
of adults anxious about change”.15
Since the publication of Streetwork, the islanding of childhood has increased, not
diminished. Children move – or, more accurately, are moved – from place to place,
travelling for the most part sealed within cars. This prevents them encountering the
relationships between time and space that Ward believed essential for them to be
able to embark on the creation of those fleeting pockets of anarchy that were educa-
tional, at least in the urban environment. Meanwhile, the idea of environmental edu-
cation has lost the urban edge realised fleetingly by Ward and Fyson during the
1970s. Environmental education has become closely associated with nature and the
values associated with natural elements and forces.16
If the curriculum of the school has become an island, we might in a sense begin
to see the laptop or iPad as the latest islanding, or at least fragmenting, device. Ward
and Fyson understood the importance of marginal in-between spaces in social life,
where they believed creative flourishing was more likely to occur than in the sanc-
tioned institution central spaces reflecting and representing state authority. This was,
they thought, inevitable and linked to play, part of what it was to be a child. The tea-
cher’s job was to manage that flourishing as well as possible, by responding to the
opportunities continually offered in the marginal spaces between subjects in the cur-
riculum and between school and village, city or town. They believed that such
spaces offered educational opportunities that, if enabled to flourish through the sug-
gested pedagogy of Streetwork and the implications of the exploding school, might
enrich lives and environments across the generations. It was in the overlooked or
apparently uninteresting spaces of the urban environment that teachers, with encour-
agement, might find a rich curriculum. Today, we might observe such “fleeting
pockets of anarchy” in the in-between spaces of social media, which offer as yet
unimagined opportunities and challenges for educational planners to expand the

15
J.R. Gillis, “The Islanding of Children – Reshaping the Mythical Landscape of Childhood,”
in Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Children, ed.
Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2008), 316–28.
16
Michael Bonnett and Jacquetta Williams, “Environmental Education and Primary
Children’s Attitudes towards Nature and the Environment,” Cambridge Journal of Education
28, no. 2 (1998): 159–74.
 Paedagogica Historica 441

parameters of school and continue to define environmental education as radical

social and urban practice.

Notes on contributor
Catherine Burke is reader in History of Childhood and Education at the University of
Cambridge. She is currently the president of the History of Education Society UK and edits
the sources and interpretations section of the journal History of Education. Her current
research examines the relationship between innovation in teaching and the design of formal
and informal learning spaces and the history of twentieth century school architecture and its
pioneers. Her publications include A Life in Education and Architecture. Mary Beaumont
Medd 1907–2005 published in 2013 by Ashgate and Education, Childhood and Anarchism.
Talking Colin Ward, edited with Ken Jones and published in 2014 by Routledge.
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Appendix 1. Articles by Colin Ward published in the Bulletin of Environmental

Education
“The Third Airport: School Broadcasting Coverage,” BEE, May 1971. Discusses the value of
BBC TV and radio programmes and packages for teachers regarding airports.
“Education for Hypocrisy,” BEE, July 1971. A critical review of A Handbook for Envi-
ronmental Education by Mark Terry.
“There is No Wealth but Life,” BEE, October 1971. On environmental projects for unem-
ployed youth.
“Urban Futures: the Uses of Utopia,” BEE, February 1972. Reviews a range of books
past and present about the future.
“No Fares Please,” BEE, July 1972. Argues for free travel in London.
“The Case for Urban Study Centres,” with Anthony Fyson, BEE, February 1973. Quotes
from Geddes (1915) Cities in Evolution.
“The City on the Wall,” BEE, June 1973. About intergenerational participatory design of
cities.
“Architecture in Schools,” with Malcolm MacEwen, BEE, June 1973. Reprinted from the
RIBA Journal.
“A Housing Study in Roehampton,” BEE, November 1973. Describes a course with
16-year-old general studies boys at Wandsworth Technical College.
“The Outlook Tower, Edinburgh Prototype for an Urban Studies Centre,” BEE, December
1973.
“Why a Carnival?,” BEE, June 1974. Practical advice on how to organise a street carnival.
“But What about Buildings that are Not in Pevsner?,” BEE, July 1974. Argues a case for
schools to record vernacular architecture.
“Say it Again, Ben!” An evocation of the first 75 years of the Town and Country Plan-
ning Association, BEE, November 1974.
“Utopia, Notes for the Teacher,” BEE, January 1975.
“The Great Politics Row,” BEE, March 1973. About the debate over politics in schools.
“Childhood and the Perceived City,” BEE, April 1975.
“Platform Shoes in the Palace of Culture,” BEE, June 1975. About school trips to other cities.
“Teddy O’Neill and his Garden,” BEE, August–September 1975.
“The Almighty Wall: the Architecture of London Schools,” BEE, December 1975.
“Towards a Happy Habitat: The Urban Predicament,” BEE, March 1976.
“Three Papers on Vandalism,” BEE, April 1976:
(1) The young at war with the environment
(2) Ownership and control of estates
(3) Teaching about vandalism
“Whatever Happened to Quarry Hill?,” BEE, June 1976. About 1930s housing in Leeds,
demolished 1973.
“At School in the Alien City,” BEE, March 1977. About the experience of pupils from
immigrant communities.
 442 C. Burke

“People’s History,” BEE, December 1977.

In August–September 1979, Ward retired from his post at the TCPA, and continued to
write for the BEE occasionally.
“Plotlands Research Project,” with Dennis Hardy, BEE, April 1980. An outline of the
current project.
“Environmental Education: Why?” BEE, June 1980.
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