Neil Selwyn’s article, The modern classroom chair: Exploring the “coercive design” of contemporary schooling, is an interesting critique of classroom furniture, school design, and the language of educational innovation. When friend and colleague Tim Surma made me aware of it I first thought it to be a hoax publication like Alan Sokal’s Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Selwyn’s basic point is that classroom chairs aren’t neutral objects. This isn’t new as all artifacts can have politics [1]. They help organise pupils’ bodies, movement, attention, visibility, and interaction. He argues that even chairs marketed as flexible, modern, collaborative, or learner-centred often preserve an old expectation: pupils should remain seated, available for work, and manageable.
There’s value in this argument. Selwyn is right to be sceptical about commercial claims that a chair can cause learning, improve cognition, encourage collaboration, or optimise the brain. Schools should be wary when furniture companies dress up marketing in the language of learning science, neuroscience, active learning, and 21st-century learning. A chair may support certain classroom routines, but it isn’t a pedagogy. It can’t replace curriculum, instruction, explanation, practice, feedback, or classroom management.
The article becomes less convincing when it treats the very act of shaping pupil behaviour as inherently suspicious, or even wrong. Selwyn uses the language of “coercion” to describe furniture that encourages pupils to sit, face forward, stay in place, or work within certain limits. But in schooling, not all constraint is bad. In fact, some constraint is necessary. A classroom isn’t simply a space for individual expression. It’s a shared instructional environment in which one child’s freedom to wander, interrupt, fidget loudly, talk over others, or refuse to participate can reduce the rest of the class’s opportunity to learn.
This is where the article’s progressive pedagogical assumptions become clearly visible. Much progressive and student-centred rhetoric starts from the idea that children should have greater control over what, when, where, and how they learn (i.e., be student led). In its stronger forms, this becomes the belief that adult – read teacher - direction is oppressive, that pupil choice is inherently liberating and positive, and that any attempt to require attention, effort, silence, posture, or participation is a form of domination. Selwyn doesn’t put the argument quite so crudely, but his strongly pejorative use of “coercion” risks moving in that direction.
The problem is that children, especially novices, don’t usually know what’s best for their own learning. They may know what they prefer or what feels comfortable, enjoyable, or immediately rewarding. But preference isn’t the same as what’s good for learning. A pupil may prefer to talk, move around, browse, avoid difficult work, or choose an easier task. But that doesn’t mean these choices are educationally wise just as the choice for salty, sweet, or fatty foods is nutritionally wise. As I, along with many other colleagues, have argued, learners are often poor judges of what supports durable learning, especially when they lack the background knowledge needed to understand what the task requires or what good study strategies are.
This matters because learning often requires doing things that aren’t immediately attractive: listening carefully, reading demanding text, practising a skill, memorising facts, revising errors, waiting one’s turn, attending to an explanation, or persisting when a task feels difficult. None of this is “coercion” in any sinister sense; it’s education. A teacher’s job isn’t merely to facilitate whatever pupils already want to do. It’s to introduce them to knowledge, practices, disciplines, and standards they wouldn’t necessarily encounter or choose on their own.
The same issue appears in the language of “21st-century skills.” Selwyn rightly tells how furniture companies often use fashionable terms such as collaboration, creativity, active learning, learner-centredness, and flexibility. But he doesn’t sufficiently challenge the progressive mythology behind some of this language. My criticism of “21st-century skills” is relevant here: many so-called 21st-century skills aren’t new, aren’t free-floating, and can’t be taught apart from knowledge. Critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, and collaboration depend heavily on what pupils know. You can’t think critically about history without historical knowledge, solve scientific problems without scientific knowledge, or collaborate productively on a task you don’t understand.
From this perspective, the real problem with some innovative classroom furniture isn’t that it “coerces” pupils into order. The deeper problem is that it’s often sold as if flexible furniture, movement, collaboration, or choice is good or that it can substitute for serious thinking about curriculum and instruction. A room full of mobile chairs doesn’t produce collaboration. A stool that lets pupils swivel doesn’t produce attention. A “learning zone” doesn’t produce learning. These objects may help or hinder depending on how they’re used, but they don’t remove the need for explicit instruction, subject knowledge, guided and independent practice, feedback, and a well-managed classroom with well-polished routines.
Selwyn is right to criticise design solutionism, but his critique would be stronger if he distinguished bad coercion from legitimate educational structure. Schools shouldn’t humiliate pupils, physically restrain them, suppress their individuality, or design environments that are uncomfortable, exclusionary, or hostile. But it’s perfectly reasonable for schools to arrange rooms in ways that discourage interruption, protect attention, and make teaching possible. A classroom needs conditions in which pupils can hear the teacher, follow an explanation, concentrate on a text, complete written work, and listen to one another. These conditions don’t emerge automatically from freedom. They require routines, norms, seating plans, and adult authority.
This point is especially important for equity. In “permissive” classrooms, the costs aren’t distributed equally. The most confident, impulsive, socially dominant, or already knowledgeable pupils may cope, or even thrive. The quieter pupil, the anxious pupil, the pupil with weaker background knowledge, the pupil who needs calm conditions, or the child with special needs will lose out in such an environment. A teacher who insists on order isn’t necessarily being authoritarian. They may be protecting the learning rights of the whole class. The freedom of one child to interrupt can become a coercive force imposed on everyone else.
There’s also a difference between concentration and passivity. Progressive critiques often treat sitting, listening, and facing the teacher as signs of outdated schooling. But listening to an expert explanation can be intellectually active. Reading silently can be demanding. Practising a procedure can build fluency. Writing an answer independently can require effortful thought. Conversely, as Robert Coe noted, a classroom full of movement, talk, choice, and collaboration can appear active while producing little or no learning. The visible appearance of activity shouldn’t be confused with cognitive engagement.
Selwyn’s article is, to a certain extent, insightful, but it also suffers from overreach. Its insight is that classroom objects embody assumptions and that commercial “learning space” rhetoric deserves scrutiny. Its overreach is the tendency to treat the shaping of pupil behaviour mainly as a problem of power, rather than also as a condition for teaching and learning. Schools do indeed direct children. They require attention, effort, and participation. But the important question isn’t whether this is coercive in some abstract philosophical sense. The important question is whether the direction is educationally justified, proportionate, humane, inclusive, and effective.
The better critique of modern classroom furniture isn’t that it constrains pupils, because all classroom designs compel pupils in some way. An open-plan learning space limits most children's ability to concentrate on what they’re doing and to listen to the teacher. A better critique is that schools should ask what kind of constraint is being created, and for what purpose. Does the furniture help pupils attend, think, read, write, practise, and participate? Does it reduce unnecessary distraction? Does it support the teacher’s ability to teach clearly? Does it help pupils with different needs access the lesson? Or does it merely signal fashionable innovation while making sustained attention and learning harder?
In conclusion, Selwyn’s article is useful because it asks teachers and school leaders to look more critically at the material design of classrooms. It rightly warns against exaggerated claims made by educational furniture companies. But its suspicion of “coercion” risks echoing a permissive progressive idea: that children’s freedom from adult direction is inherently educationally good. That idea isn’t supported by what we know about novices (basically all pupils), attention, cognitive load, classroom management, or the role of knowledge and concentration in learning.
A more reasonable conclusion is this: schools shouldn’t be ashamed of creating conditions for concentration. They should do so intelligently, humanely, and with attention to pupils’ comfort and dignity. But classrooms are places for learning, and learning often requires structure. Furniture should be judged not by whether it maximises pupil choice or avoids all constraint, but by whether it helps teachers teach and pupils learn.
[1] Langdon Winner’s classic article Do Artifacts Have Politics? (Daedalus, 1980) discusses Robert Moses’s low overpasses on Long Island parkways. Winner argued that these overpasses were built too low for buses to pass underneath, which meant that people who depended on public transport – read disproportionately poorer and Black New Yorkers - had much less access to public places like Jones Beach. In that sense, the bridges weren’t politically neutral pieces of infrastructure; they embodied social and political choices in concrete and steel.
If you want to invite me to talk to you and your fellow teachers about what good learning and instruction is, please contact me.
Thanks for your interesting view on this topic.
Thanks for this, Paul. Your articles are always thought-provoking, substantial and useful. They have changed how I think about the work I do in my classroom.