The Cathedral of Learning, a pale gothic spire with the honorific of second-tallest educational building in the world, towers over the University of Pittsburgh. The metaphor is just as obvious. In the 1950s, manufacturing occupied over a third of Pittsburgh’s workforce. When heavy industry in rust belt cities collapsed in the 1970s and ’80s, Pittsburgh recovered better than most. Industry cratered there, too, but the city successfully transitioned to a white-collar economy made up of banking, medical research, tech, and education. Today, there are no active steel mills within city limits, and the two largest employers are the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh.
This outcome was perhaps thanks to the long symbiosis between industry and the area’s schools. As the soot-smeared city produced a third of the country’s steel in the run-up to the Great Depression, it benefitted from the largesse of Pittsburgh-based robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. Their names graced universities and libraries, and their taxes underpinned public schools. Their philanthropy was also self-serving: a well-trained population made for better workers. Rather than “bringing knowledge and upward social mobility within reach of everyone,” wrote artist Allan Sekula in a 1982 introduction to his photo essay School is a Factory (1978–80), education systems perform a “relentless sorting function...tracking individuals into places in a complex division of labor while suggesting that we have only ourselves to blame for our failures.”1
Since the 1970s, the Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), once the pride of one of the country’s richest cities, have succumbed to a doom spiral of maintenance costs. When repairs become too expensive, tipping over the tables of the system’s actuaries, schools are shuttered and the buildings are sold. A declining population—down 50 percent since its height in the 1950s—has led to further closures and consolidation. Private schools funded by vouchers hasten the cycle.
It’s tempting to see the struggling PPS as yet another casualty of systemic neglect wrought by globalization, deindustrialization, and white flight. But more than public education is at stake. At least in its idealized form, PPS was anchored by a notion that schools are more than data-delivery systems, more than factories for well-rounded citizens. Instead, they were considered integral to all of civic life.
Maybe this idea of a collective social fabric was naive. The PPS’s contraction at the new millennium follows a systematic, scientific ethic that has grown in tandem with US industry, from Taylorism to cybernetics to big data. Sometimes the comparison is startlingly explicit, as in this passage from Ellwood Cubberley’s 1916 book Public School Administration: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” Cubberley, in addition to steering Stanford’s School of Education, was also a eugenicist. Subjecting human beings to factory standards suggests a dehumanizing level of quality control. As Cubberley wrote in the same volume: “We have only recently begun to recognize that the same biological principles apply to the rearing of children that apply to the care of trees, grains, horses, cattle, hogs, and dogs.”
In 1916, fittingly, a Pittsburgh district superintendent of buildings named C.L. Wooldridge compared schools to steel mills: “Pittsburgh is happiest when her mills run double and treble turn,” he wrote, and the Steel City would likewise benefit from twenty-four-hour activity in her schools.2 Here, in the language of callous scientific efficiency, was the kernel of civic life: Schools could teach children by morning, offer exercise and entertainment to adults in the afternoons and evenings, and devote classrooms to continuing-education courses at night. The public school was for everyone. In a telling paraphrase of that famous socialist slogan, Wooldridge proclaimed: “A democracy...means that everyone has an inalienable right to that type of training or education which is suited to his ability or to his needs.”3
The 1930s were perhaps the peak of this vision of public schooling in Pittsburgh, if not across the US. Schools not only educated but also strengthened families, social ties, and communities, all of which ultimately benefitted employers as much as workers. But gradually, the laborer and the pupil become abstract entries in a dematerialized calculus of efficiency.
A plea for civic ownership of public schools is the drive of “after school,” an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art curated by Theodossis Issaias and Alyssa Velazquez and on view until January 11, 2026. The exhibition features new work or displays by eight international artists and architectural practices that portray modular, fluid, ad-hoc means of education developed on a community level, from the US-Mexico border to rural Senegal. One room houses a model town center / artist studio / outdoor classroom by the architect Toshiko Mori, another an imaginative inflatable playground by Leah Wulfman tinted with projections of children’s drawings. While these ideas might work anywhere, Pittsburgh is the show’s backdrop and its target audience. At the exhibition’s core are several vitrines’ worth of archival material drawn from the Carnegie Museum and scattered PPS archives. Architectural renderings and blueprints hint at the grand visions for older buildings and the care taken with certain renovations; newspaper clippings detail protests against the system’s shortcomings. These materials outline the phases of development and retrenchment in the area’s schools and explore under-realized educational models that supplement, rather than supplant, public grade school. Ensemble, they argue for a return to a sense that the public as a whole has a stake in education.
Schenley High School, located in the North Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, exemplified the city’s civic pride in public institutions. The school building, which first opened its doors in 1916, featured a distinctive triangular footprint with two interior courtyards, lofted ceilings, and a colonnaded neoclassical facade made of the same Indiana limestone as thirty-five of the country’s fifty capital buildings. It also incorporated a 1,550-seat auditorium, a basketball court, and a swimming pool, all of which were open for public use after the school day. It was the first American high school whose construction budget exceeded a million dollars. Andy Warhol was a notable alum.
Although the building once stood for PPS’s wholistic-engagement ideals, it eventually came to represent the educational system’s decline. In 2008, an independent audit determined that the cost of asbestos abatement for the aging facility was too high to justify, and the classrooms were consequently closed. The building was soon sold and converted into private housing. (The architecture firm that led the adaptive-reuse process notes on their website that one of their employees was among the last to study there.)4 Today, the Schenley Apartments advertise large windows and prewar architectural character. Built-in blackboards add charm to many of the units. The basketball court and auditorium have been repurposed as amenities for the residents. In fact, the building’s former life as a school gives the apartments an authenticity dividend akin to that of “lofts.” Schenley High School is not the only former PPS building that has been resurrected for profit; at least seven others, from the Prospect School in 2006 to the Letsche School in 2024, have had the same fate. Investors clearly calculated it was worth renovating these structures. The calculations of the PPS, however—perhaps because the value of a well-educated child is hard to quantify—favored an austerity spiral, in which chronic deferral of maintenance compounds the cost of repairs until the only feasible choice is to offload the real estate.
Yet just as clearly, these buildings—many of them on the historic register—were made to last. “after school” highlights the care with which many of PPS’s buildings were designed, in the early twentieth century, with flourishes like metal gratings or an elaborate, never-realized celestial painting in the auditorium of Burgwin Elementary. As Issaias points out in the catalog, the fact that a city architect would go out of their way to embellish a ceiling speaks to a full-spectrum attention to detail that went beyond a rough partition between practicality and ornamentation. By midcentury, however, practicality was all.
Fairly or not, Schenley’s arc follows a shift in social priorities. The education reformers who supported the Free Public School Act of 1834 saw universal education as a path to the betterment of all men, and thereby society as a whole—with the significant caveat that appeals to the common good often explicitly excluded women, nonwhite men, and slaves, or meant forcibly assimilating surviving Indigenous groups. This early wave was largely a philanthropic, “progressive” movement. The New Deal solidified federal influence in education, along with many other spheres of public life. Men designed, built, decorated, attended, and sent their children to neighborhood schools.
Since then, American education has trended toward privatization and deregulation. Resistance to publicly mandated education crested in the neoliberal 1980s (coinciding with the implosion of domestic manufacturing). Schooling was phrased as a matter of free markets. But citizens’ rights had been recast as “choices” as early as 1955, when the second Brown v. Board of Education decision mandated desegregation in public schools “with all deliberate speed.” The economist Milton Friedman took the occasion to muse that enforced segregation was immoral—but so was forced integration. These rights were irreconcilable. The answer, he found, was choice. In short, the right to a good education was qualified by the right to choose your school—and with whom you or your children studied. This ideology led to de facto segregation and, increasingly, the hollowing out of public-school systems with voucher programs that shuffle public funds to private academies.
Heavily redlined Pittsburgh was especially slow to desegregate. The displays in “after school” describe plans made around 1965 for charismatic megastructures known as the Great High Schools—five space-age complexes that would replace every existing city high school and gather their students into classes thousands strong. Thus would integration be accomplished all at once. These designs were never realized. Neither were structures on the opposite side of the scale, called “demountables.” Conceived in the late 1950s and early ’60s, these were essentially overbuilt trailers, designed in the spirit of postwar peacetime retooling to make use of Pittsburgh’s abundant supply of steel, aluminum, and concrete. Each unit was eight feet wide and forty feet long, with ceilings below eight feet, standardized for tractor trailers—a somewhat sleeker version of the eight-by-eight-by-forty steel intermodal container that brought new degrees of efficiency and abstraction to global trade during the same period 5. In theory, four could be combined into a passable classroom. Not many were built, and, according to the “after school” catalog, only one prototype remains. But the “demountable” program speaks to the PPS’s reluctance to commit to permanent facilities. The city responded to demographic and social shifts first by envisioning utopian garden cities full of willing pupils, then by trying modular, ad-hoc solutions that, like beleaguered FEMA trailers of the mind, would arrive wherever needed. Both the Great High Schools and the demountables reveal a school system thinking systemically, rather than locally; with the demountables, the shift is well underway to a cybernetic, logistical, abstract approach to education, in which the children are practically interchangeable, if not standardized, like products crated on ships.
Certain trends in the ostensibly race-blind logistical picture affected residents unequally. Case in point is the bussing debate. Indisputably, the Pittsburgh Public Schools student population had declined dramatically; “rightsizing” made sense. But Black families wondered why it was schools in their neighborhoods that were shuttered for under-enrollment, and why their kids were the ones bussed across town to pad the rolls of schools convenient to white neighborhoods and keep them open. Faced with sub-par public instruction, Black communities organized to fill the gaps. In the 1960s, Pittsburgh had an outpost of the Street Academy movement, called the Manchester Street Academy, which offered classes in two daily sessions on topics from Afro-American history to trigonometry. Their students ranged in age from fifteen to fifty-five. The Academy wasn’t meant to replace public schooling, but to supplement both its curricular and social functions. This grassroots effort paralleled that of the Black Panthers.
A widespread preoccupation with the latter organization’s militancy has obfuscated its ardent investment in community services, such as the Free Breakfasts for School Children Program, which put into practice the Party’s belief that lifting black Americans out of hunger and poverty was essential to their liberation. In “after school,” a bamboo structure installed in the exhibition’s atrium demonstrates the several kinds of joints, simple yet flexible, that comprise an “urban classroom” envisioned by Ayanna Jones and Vicky Achnani. In this vaulted greenhouse and planting shed, contemporary students would learn about food infrastructure as well as practical farming techniques in an afterschool program in the spirit of the Free Breakfasts. Jones frames the lack of fresh food in Black neighborhoods in logistical terms: these are not accidental food deserts, but examples of systemic “food apartheid.”
The actuaries can point to their tables, or their algorithms, or their laws. In 1992, a group of activists for Black students, called the Advocates for African-American Students, filed an official objection to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission against the Pittsburgh Board of Education, citing racist and discriminatory treatment of Pittsburgh students. Four years later, the group's claim was rejected on the grounds that it did not have proper standing. Only by the atomizing logic of efficiency do all members of a community not have a stake in free, fair, quality public schooling. The group—since renamed the Equity Advisory Panel—has refiled their complaint consistently ever since; it’s up for renewal again in 2027.
In the meantime, another even more abstract version of the Great High Schools is edging in on classrooms around the country. The Covid pandemic provided the pretext to expand remote learning on an unprecedented scale. Schools once anchored civic life; global lockdowns absolved local educational systems of any responsibility in that regard, and a generation of students spent a formative chunk of their schooling with only the virtual suggestion of peers or society. A new kind of centralization, only dreamed of by the originators of the Great School, took hold. Pupils entered the virtual factory like so much raw material, to be anxiously shaped by underprepared remote teachers. It was an imperfect experiment in direct data-based instruction, just short of the sheer educational downloads imagined in the (dystopian) Matrix films. Yet the psychic and social deficits that mark this generation will, in relief, demonstrate the shortfalls of an educational system envisioned on abstract, inhuman terms. Today’s Cathedral of Learning is a data center. As Sekula writes in School is a Factory, “resistance is almost always limited only to the possibility of tuning out.” There is some hope, though, in what “after school” recovers from Pittsburgh’s nostalgic industrial past: an idea of school as a place, for everyone.
Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984. 226–27.
C. L. Wooldridge, “Wider Use of Schools,” School Board Journal LIII, no. 6 (1916): 32. Quoted in Theodossis Issaias, “A Plan for a Reflected Ceiling,” “after school,” 2025
Wooldridge, “Wider Use of Schools,” 32.
“Schenley High School Revisited,” Strada →
See Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, 1988–95, for more on shipping containers.
