Classrooms, set in stone?

Natural beauty
I keep this pretty stone on my desk. I picked it up on a beach because it had a pleasingly odd shape. Later, I realised I'd caught the stone in the act.

Stone works on a different timescale to us, so catching them in the act is hard. But this isn't an ordinary stone. If you look carefully (or, if you're an avid beachcomber, you might have already noticed) you can see the unusual curves and grooves of this pebble are due to the fact that it used to be a roof tile.

Another month (year? decade?) and this tile would look wholly natural, worn down by the sea and the elements. It would have gone native.

Högertrafikomläggningen
It doesn't take long for things to become 'natural' (even learning how to hold a pen correctly won't take me that long) and people go to extraordinary lengths to justify what feels right, even at the expense of logic and sense. Visitors to the UK feel that driving on the left is 'wrong' and many have taken the trouble to tell me this - and why. Even people from Sweden have told me this.

Some of these Swedes were alive (though probably not very old) on Hagen D, which was in 1967. Day H was the day Swedes started driving on the left. Like many countries, (and this includes much of the rest of the pre-Napoleonic Code world) Sweden had thought it natural to drive on the left. Until it wasn't.

Was it an easy switch? Of course not. For example, "many older people gave up driving rather than learn to cope with the new rule of the road." There were other casualties too. Sweden's yellow road markings had to go, changed to white to avoid confusion with the old way. You can imagine the conversation, "First, they change which side we drive on, now they're changing the colour of our road markings..."

Natural Born Classrooms
Gary Woodill's webinar, The History of Classrooms as Learning Technology at first seems like a triumph of grandiose titling (something to which I'm no stranger). Classrooms as a technology? But, it turns out, classrooms are a relatively recent invention. And the reasons they were introduced weren't always positive:

". . .classrooms captured and constricted bodies in order to render them as docile subjects. Their purpose was as much disciplinary as educational"

Life moves faster than stone. It's even harder to catch it in the act, as the artificial and the man-made goes native and starts to feel natural.

Postcript
Take two groups of right-handed right-side driving people and ask the following two questions:

1. Which is your strongest hand?
2. What's more important, gearstick or steering wheel?

For group one, ask the two questions in quick succession. For group two, ask the questions 'with a knowing look'. The second group will come up with a way of avoiding Question 2 and the first group will claim that you 'cheated.' Try it.

It's not too late to save yourselves!
It's worth noting that one of the 'reasons' given for the change from left to right in Sweden was to reduce the amount of accidents caused by Swedes driving left-hand drive cars on the left hand side of the road, apparently a fatal combination. The number of accidents remained constant after a two-year blip.

Incidentally, one of the main drivers for the change from left to right was the amount of accidents. The accident rate didn't decrease.

The preparation for the day was extraordinary. A shadow set of signs were set up and wrapped in black plastic. Government operatives roamed the streets in the darkness of the night of the change to pull the plastic off the morning before the switch.

Samoa changed from driving on the right last month (September 2009). See, it's never too late.