Abstract:
At Mona Vale on Sydney’s northern beaches, English psychologist Mary Sheridan established ‘Quest Haven’, Australia’s first progressive school in a former seaside resort mansion in the late 1920s. This paper will examine the intrinsic relationship between Sheridan’s pedagogical aims and emphasis on visual art, child psychology, and freedom of movement, and the spaces of the existing house and its surrounding landscape. Key to the school’s relaxed environment was the sense of spontaneity and serendipity that came with inhabiting a series of spaces that had not been purpose-built for education. In many respects, it was the scale of the small school population and the need to ‘make do’, which paralleled similar ventures into experimental education that were fostered in existing country houses, church halls and rural structures in the early decades of the twentieth century in Great Britain and Europe. All made full use of non-traditional classrooms. Some even did away completely with the idea of the conventional classroom. Instead, a diverse array of interior and exterior spaces like a drawing room, a library, a ballroom, a barn, a garden, a farmyard and even the natural environment itself became spaces for learning: understudies for the classrooms of tomorrow.