A classroom without walls

July 22, 2020 5:52 PM

In the early 20th century, open air schools became fairly common in Northern Europe, originally designed to prevent and combat the widespread rise of tuberculosis that occurred in the period leading up to the Second World War. Schools were built on the concept that exposure to fresh air, good ventilation and exposure to the outside were paramount!
posted by rebent (30 comments total)

The elementary school I went to in southern NM when I first started school had like 18-20' ceilings (maybe higher) and very high transom windows and lots of windows that opened in each room. It was a very light-filled and airy feeling building. I wonder if it was built during an era when this kind of thing was a concern and so that's why it was designed that way. I do know southern NM was one of those places people moved to who had various health problems to be in the desert air and heat.
posted by hippybear at 7:23 PM on July 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

I have had TB and pneumonia. I'm an old guy. With Covid-19 going around, outside is better than inside.
posted by baegucb at 7:40 PM on July 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

Why doesn't this article talk about how the weather might affect online schooling? I mean, it sounds great in fall and spring, but what about rainy season? Or snow? Or worse?
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:02 PM on July 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

This just came up in Ontario. Our premier suggested that class outdoors could be an option. Of course he is known for his, shall we say, unrehearsed approach to policy making and general incompetence. It sounds like it was a passing thought that he seized on rather than some well-thought out plan.

News link
posted by The Hyacinth Girl at 9:15 PM on July 22, 2020

So this crosses my mind on occasion, as we have a similar climate in the PNW, but I'm curious how you do it when rain is a permanent risk and schools run on paper and electricity.
posted by wotsac at 9:20 PM on July 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

Class outdoors is not an option in an Ontario winter. Not in a real Ontario winter. Maybe it's an option in a Toronto winter...

More seriously, in most of Canada outdoor school would be practical only during summer months. Planning to get a big percentage of an educational year done outdoors in May-August 2021 might be something to plan for if we are being pessimistic about vaccine development.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 9:23 PM on July 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

My third-grade teacher used to have class outside a lot when weather permitted. And we had lunch outside even more often (small school, no cafeteria, each class had lunch separately in their own room). It was lovely except when my allergies were acting up. The building was built by the WPA in the 1930s, and it had those nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that had to be opened with a window pole. We had them open whenever possible. I think there’s a lot to be said for fresh air for young kids.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:35 PM on July 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

I think there's a lot to be said for fresh air for everyone!
posted by hippybear at 9:38 PM on July 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

My elementary in rural Arkansas was wall-less. It was one enormous building, with the library in the center and maybe 16 "classrooms" in a ring around it (the music classes were taught in a portable building out behind the school). All barriers between those spaces were delineated with chest high rolling bookshelves. In hindsight, it was pretty cool. There was a lot more social engagement and awareness in there. A lot of age mixing and teacher swaps for different modules. The story we always heard was, "the school burned down so many times they just stopped building walls." In hindsight, it totally wouldn't surprise me that this was a byproduct of health concerns in a place where the nearest hospital was a couple hours away. Very neat post!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 9:51 PM on July 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

My elementary school was built in the late 1960s/early 70s in an era of wall-less schools. I agree it was a better experience than what I later worked in. All students were integrated together - there was no closed-off classroom for students in wheelchairs or with severe behavioural issues. I think it built up empathy in the students.

Ontario had outdoor schools right up until 1962 (excellent TVO article). I used the principles of Forest Schools when homeschooling, and really, there is usually only a few completely unbearable days (which are normally snow days anyways so the kids stay home). I would love for it to come back in a big way, but I can see suburban and rural schools having more luck just due to logistics. Except for the Toronto schools near a large park, most urban schools are just pavement outdoors. And I worry about runners needing a one-on-one EA when there is no funding to support their needs.
posted by saucysault at 9:57 PM on July 22, 2020 [7 favorites]

There’s no reason to transfer desk work to outdoor settings. Send the desk work home or do it online. Schools that are lucky enough to have outdoor grounds should have Field Day twice a week, or do some outdoor explorations. I am lucky enough to teach in a district in the PNW with 200 acres of forest trails, ponds, gardens — we can’t convince the district to organize teacher-led activities on those grounds. They’re hung up on School and can’t imagine anything else, so they’re talking online only.
posted by argybarg at 10:45 PM on July 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

Interesting how some of these hundred year old design ideas for open environments - developed for a time of TB and in place at the time of the 1919 Influenza outbreak - have circled back to seem relevant again in 2020. Open air schools and also hospitals with much more emphasis on air circulation were much more in vogue a century ago - or less. I have been a fan of nursing teacher Dr John Campbell's videos. He often talks about his early career memories of hospital wards where giant windows would be opened each morning to try to minimise viral and bacterial transmission in the air - and they have been replaced with closed of HVAC systems of today.

So it is for open air schools: they offer an environment with much less scope for infection transmission in a pandemic with an air bourne pathogen - they help teachers and school kids get a decent expose to sunlight and hence allow them to boost their vitamin D to reduce the changes of bad infections. And finally there is evidence that the outdoor environment can help reduce the chances of younger children developing myopia.
posted by rongorongo at 12:51 AM on July 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

Open air school sounds lovely and Athenian in a rural or even most suburban environments. How does/did it work in an urban setting?
posted by basalganglia at 1:18 AM on July 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

The elementary school I went to in southern NM when I first started school had like 18-20' ceilings (maybe higher) and very high transom windows and lots of windows that opened in each room. It was a very light-filled and airy feeling building. I wonder if it was built during an era when this kind of thing was a concern and so that's why it was designed that way. I do know southern NM was one of those places people moved to who had various health problems to be in the desert air and heat.

The elementary school I went to in the late eighties/early nineties was this way. It was built around WW1 and still didn't have central air. All of the windows opened and all the rooms had these huge old ceiling fans. It definitely made an impression in my memory.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:28 AM on July 23, 2020 [3 favorites]

How does/did it work in an urban setting?

Birmingham had half a dozen outdoor schools which were built around the edges of the city, some boarding and some day schools. My great-aunt spent some time at Cropwood, probably in the late twenties or early thirties, because she was "delicate" (and her mother had had TB when she was younger). Twenty miles away from home on the other side of the city, she hated it because of being separated from her family, and it seems to have been a harsh environment even by the standards of UK children's homes. Her slightly older sister was jealous because she got "special" treatment - I remember fresh eggs being a particular point of dispute.
posted by nja at 2:41 AM on July 23, 2020 [3 favorites]

Interesting how some of these hundred year old design ideas for open environments - developed for a time of TB and in place at the time of the 1919 Influenza outbreak - have circled back to seem relevant again in 2020.

My town opened its new multimillion state-of-the-art high school at the beginning of this year. None of the classrooms have walls, more like regions within a large 'learning space'. The design was not about health, but to facilitate so-called project based learning.
posted by Thella at 3:25 AM on July 23, 2020

My elementary in rural Arkansas was wall-less.

I forget what the term for these "open" schools is, but it was a fad in Arkansas in the 70s. Sadly, it's nothing so interesting as a lack of resources due to repeated fires.

The school where I spent 8th and 9th grade was originally built in the pod style, but they had walled it off the large spaces into individual classrooms by the time I was there. It made for some very oddly shaped rooms. My kindergarten semester (K was only a half year then) was in one of those open schools, but had a few separate classrooms for kindergarten since it was felt that the youngest kids would be loud enough to disrupt the rest of the classes. All the grade 1-6 classes were in one big room, separated with bookshelves and the like, though.
posted by wierdo at 5:32 AM on July 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

In the 1700 and early 1800s the Irish had hedge schools, thanks to various laws against Catholic education. Well, and poverty and lack of buildings and so on. Still, even though they were at risk of prosecution if they were found, soon shifted indoors because no one can teach outside for most of the year in Ireland. Can't see this working that well as a concept for most climates, especially when you realize even the Athenians had sheltered spaces for bad weather teaching. And too hot weather.

The Romans did do outdoor schooling in urban settings, but they did it on the streets, which probably wouldn't be exactly what most parents now think of as ideal. Especially for younger kids. I often wonder how many they lost in an average year just from falling in the Tiber.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 5:53 AM on July 23, 2020

The elementary school I went to in southern NM when I first started school had like 18-20' ceilings (maybe higher) and very high transom windows

My house (in SE England) is part of a converted school from the 1860s. It was originally a single storey. That single storey was tall enough that even now that it's been turned into a two-storey house, the ceilings are *still* too high for me to reach, in some places so high that I can't change a bulb even from the top of a stepladder as tall as I am. The windows are huge, and the lowest of them start at my head height, about 5'6". It's very light and airy in here.

(They didn't do so well on the opening windows front though. There are a few, but I've never lived anywhere so difficult to ventilate.)
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:04 AM on July 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

My kids elementary school was built in the early 1970s. Most of the classrooms don't have windows at all, or have a small window in the door to the outside. Even though the school has been there since the 1970s, the outside only has two small playgrounds and a pavilion that wouldn't be out of place in a mcmansion backyard, and lots of lumpy barely mowed grass. The school has close to 500 students.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:34 AM on July 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

The unique style of education remained popular until the 1970s. After the introduction of antibiotics and the improvement of social conditions at home, open air schools were needed less and less after World War II and were gradually phased out.

I wonder if the rise of air conditioning had something to do with the change, too. Dunno. The places I went to elementary and high school in the South were built in the thirties, and had a *lot* of windows... that were almost always closed and shaded, with the AC running full blast.

I think about this sort of thing a lot lately; when I moved back to New Orleans, I ended up in half of a shotgun double, which is a style of house designed for natural ventilation and making hot climates livable. High ceilings, transom windows to open and let the air flow through, ceiling fans... and all the transoms are painted shut, and all but one window is permanently closed, with window AC units crammed into them.
posted by egypturnash at 7:56 AM on July 23, 2020 [5 favorites]

I forget what the term for these "open" schools is

Open concept/open plan/open classroom.
posted by cooker girl at 8:12 AM on July 23, 2020

The school buildings I've seen in SE Asia have screened windows and covered verandah "hallways" on the outside and definitely no aircon. So maybe a possible solution is to have semi-outdoor (roof, no walls) classes and invert the school year: classes during spring/summer/fall and the long holiday during the depths of winter.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:17 AM on July 23, 2020

Open concept/open plan/open classroom

I could have sworn there was a more specific term, but it's been decades since I last even thought about it, so maybe it was just called open classroom. Last I remember seeing it was in an article in the local paper back in the early 00s that gave some historical context to the announcement that the elementary school I described was being renovated.
posted by wierdo at 8:38 AM on July 23, 2020

Open concept/open plan/open classroom.

Both my early grade school and high school were open concept, although by the time I got to high school the whole thing had been been subdivided by thin walls without doors. My favourite English teacher once told me that when people asked her about it, she used to say that it was because this would let students not in the class be able to pick up things happening in classes as they walked by. So if a class was (e.g.) watching a film, a student walking by could lurk outside and watch some of it. But then she discovered that the real reason was that they were cheap.

I found the whole open-concept thing incredibly distracting and when I switched to a school with proper classrooms in the middle grades, I was (slightly) better at concentrating.
posted by suetanvil at 9:00 AM on July 23, 2020

So maybe a possible solution is to have semi-outdoor (roof, no walls) classes and invert the school year: classes during spring/summer/fall and the long holiday during the depths of winter.

Ah, you are making the mistake in thinking that neo-liberal/conservative governments would fund something with the goal of making the students’ experience of school better. No, no, we can’t have students at home during the busy pre-Christmas retail period. That might affect how the employees are able to work (capitalism has been insidious about teach people to exploit themselves - physically, mentally, morally, to make the global corporation another buck in profit, but even desperate parents are reluctant to leave a small child or baby unsupervised for 10+ hours a day).
posted by saucysault at 10:45 AM on July 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

> it sounds great in fall and spring, but what about rainy season?

For that you need something like the Canuanã school in Tocantins. It was inspired by traditional rainforest architecture, very open with great airflow but at the same time protected from rain. It won the RIBA prize in 2018.
posted by Tom-B at 4:15 PM on July 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I attended sixth grade in one of those schools that had been built open plan and later converted to standard classrooms. None of the teachers who had been there before the conversion had anything good to say about the open plan system. I think it only works if the school is holistically operated according to that philosophy, with all the staff and community on board. You can’t just plop a run-of-the-mill school into an open building and try to operate it in a run-of-the-mill way.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:15 AM on July 24, 2020 [4 favorites]

The school buildings I've seen in SE Asia have screened windows and covered verandah "hallways" on the outside and definitely no aircon.

This works here because of the tropical climate though; in the tropics the main purpose of shelter is to keep away the hot sun and heavy rain, and walls are mostly optional and often porous to allow more cross-ventilation for better cooling. That wouldn't work in temperate countries in the winter-time, when you want to keep the cold wind out.

Sadly, I think more or more schools here are starting to become air-conditioned boxes.
posted by destrius at 8:35 AM on July 25, 2020

Wow. I'm quite mindblown. As someone from Asia, I never knew nor have experienced classroom with walls. It would also be very difficult to make no-wall classrooms a possibility in countries which lie close to the equator because the climate is just too strong most of the year. The sun is too strong in the summer (to the point that people die from heat strokes) and the rainy season stretches atleast 3 to 4 months as well. Might be possible during winter or dryer/moderate places. Lately most classrooms here are transitioning to have air-conditioners installed irrespective of anything else.
posted by MetaSquid at 3:32 AM on July 28, 2020