Disconnected Thoughts on an Education in Crisis

written by Ali Al Yousifi

Illustrated by Abdulla Ali

I seriously feel like punching someone (and I’m usually not a violent person). The reason for this fistful of fury is the impending doom I sense whenever I remember how much college work I have for the next few weeks. I have a design pinup, design final submission, a model submission, a final exam, a final project submission, another final project submission, another final exam, and yet another final project submission. Is it humanly possible to organize one’s time and meet all these sinister deadlines? Yes. But it seems ridiculous for an educational system (especially architecture school) to constantly strive to push students to the edge. Who says that the best ideas and the most productive work come at the students’ breaking point of stress and anxiety?  

The absurd culture of all-nighters, power naps, and junk takeout food that architecture schools sustain has been encouraged for so long that sadly it has become a point of pride for students. They each retell to their friends how many hours they spent without sleeping, or how many cups of coffee they drank to stay awake, gleefully describing every time they thought their computer crashed and they had lost all their work, or that time when they sliced a section through their finger while building a model. This is not something the architectural world should be proud of; it is instead a disgrace.

To take sleep deprivation for example, as only one of the many unhealthy lifestyle characteristics of an architecture student as a result of a schedule overload, has been medically proven to impair “attention, alertness, concentration, reasoning,and problem solving”; it also causes forgetfulness, depression, and countless other health problems. Is this how we want architects to be: sad, sick, and stupid?

One of my professors once asked us in class, “why aren’t you curious?” referencing a lack of passion towards architecture in most students in Kuwait University. But this is to be expected, because architecture school has demoted the culturally rich, historically loaded, fascinating subject of architecture into an endless series of facts to be memorized, drawings to be drafted, and deadlines to be met. The student lives from assignment to assignment, never catching his breath to contemplate the interesting nature of the built environment and how he personally feels towards it.

Professors seem to operate with the assumption that if they allow the students a week without work that they will waste it sleeping and watching TV, but this is untrue. I, for one, would love to have the time to read many books waiting on my bedside table, or participate in international design competitions, or even sit on a chair and think. Yes… just sitting for hours and thinking, isn’t that how philosophers reached their most brilliant insights on human nature and the universe?

To conclude, I’d like to say that an education based on the redundant giving of the maximum number of assignments and the completion of the maximum number of assignments is a superficial education, and that learning to be an architect and growing as a person is about much (much) more… I think we can do better.