Window on a world of education

Every morning across the world half a billion schoolchildren sit down at their desks. It is a system which has been around since the 16th century and which remains universal in its configuration and artefacts – desks, black or whiteboard, school uniforms and hours of learning.

Through a haunting, revealing series of images, Julian Germain observes in detail the classroom environment worldwide.

In each image, from Bradford’s Rhodesway School to Kuramo Junior College in Lagos, Nigeria, the children’s gazes are fixed on to the reader.

Whether it’s a class in Missouri or Yemen, their faces express curiosity, intensity, even boredom, as the camera captures a mix of personalities, attitudes and approaches to learning.

“If you were to ask people from different parts of the world, from ten to 90-years-old, what school is about and what it generally looks like, their answers would most likely be very similar,” writes Dr Leonid Ilyushin, Professor of Pedagogy at St Petersburg State University, in the foreword.

“Despite the enormous contrast in resources and facilities between an elite school in Europe and a poor school in rural Africa, buildings and classrooms will, in many ways, be similar.”

Dr Ilyushin accepts that the school system is “inevitably approaching a time of great change,” not least from growing individualism, communications and new concepts of self-learning.

He adds: “Those who are going to change it... could be in this book, sitting calmly in their Comenius-style classrooms, looking steadily into the camera.”

Julian was inspired by a visit to his daughter’s school in 2004, when he realised he hadn’t set foot in a classroom for more than 20 years.

“Our school days are a collective, formative experience, a memory matrix allowing complete strangers to find common ground,” he writes.

The book is comprised of 450 of Julian’s striking photographs from more than 20 countries, filling the pages with information without words.

Although the portraits are linked by the classroom environment, they reveal much about the wider cultural environment too. The pupils’ clothes says something about their society, as do the pictures and notices – or lack of them – on the walls.

The image of Year 9 maths pupils at Rhodesway School shows striking graphs and a brightly coloured algebra poster on the walls, in stark contrast to a maths class at a boys’ school in Yemen, in which pupils wearing prison-like uniforms are crowded into a small concrete unit, and a school in Ethiopia with mud-painted walls where 50 children share a handful of books.

Year 6 pupils at Keighley’s Guard House Primary School are dressed for a history lesson in period costume. An outdoor ‘classroom’ in Peru shows a group of boys sitting on rusty chairs by a broken wall, and a few pages later children in Madrid, Spain, pose with their cellos in a well-equipped music room.

Girls in red uniforms sit cross-legged on the floor of their makeshift classroom in Bangladesh, while in Tokyo neat rows of teenagers sit in front of state-of-the-art computers.

Portraits of political leaders adorn the walls of a Cuban classroom, whereas a banner bearing the words “Mathematics is Fun” takes pride of place in a Northumberland class.

What future awaits the children in an orderly St Petersburg primary school, or the Dutch mechanics students photographed with their study car hoisted on a jack behind them?

This fascinating book shows that, although the basic classroom model is the same around the world, there is huge variety within that space.