The Effect of School Boom Temperature on the Work of Pupils
- Author:
Linnaeus N. Hikes,
Superintendent of Schools, Crawfordsville, Ind.
One of the present-day problems is the heating and ventilating of buildings. It is only within the last few years that much attention has been paid to the proper introduction of air into buildings, its distribution in correct amounts and at the right temperature. Through thousands of years architecture did not concern itself very much with properly heating and ventilating edifices. The development of the study of medicine, and especially of hygiene, has led to a fuller appreciation of what the human organism needs. The increasing warfare against lung diseases and investigations into causes and the conditions in which they originate and thrive have brought the world to a fuller understanding of what is needed to preserve and lengthen human life.
To-day, despite what the world ihas learned, mo greater crimes of ignorance against public health are committed than the defective planning of our homes, our schools, our churches, our railway coaches, and all the places where people congregate. Nothing is so cheap as pure air, yet so sparingly is it provided in the great majority of our public buildings and in our dwellings that, in spite of the general warfare against the white plague, this disease continues its widespread devastation.
The greatest sins of carelessness and indifference are committed against children in our public schools. We compel children to attend our schools for so many hours every school day in the year, and then and tliere deprive them of the cheapest and most necessary of God’s gifts to man, fresh air. Compelling children to attend school is right, but forcing them to spend the school hours in poorly ventilated and improperly heated rooms contributes as much, perhaps, to the poor health of the youth *Paper read before the Third Annual Congress of the American School Hygiene Association; February 25, 1909, Chicago.
of our land as any other one cause. The laws of every state ought to provide that the heating and ventilating of school rooms shall be in the hands of a commission of experts who would no more allow school to be held in a room improperly heated and ventilated than in a building which is on fire or about to fall down, or which has been closed on account of smallpox. Certain rules for heating and ventilating buildings should be laid down and every patron of a school should have the right to go to court and prevent the holding of school sessions in buildings which fail to come up to the necessary requirements. School rooms throughout the length and breadth of our land are not properly ventilated?they are overheated and they are underheated. This is a crime against the childhood and youth of our country. A smallpox case appears in a school and there is at once the greatest excitement for fear that the children generally will be stricken. Pupils are kept in poorly ventilated and improperly heated school rooms year in and year out?their health is undermined; diseases of the breathing organs develop?results more disastrous than those entailed by smallpox are produced; yet school authorities and patrons go on in their careless and criminal ignorance, sacrificing the health and even the lives of the pupils who are under their care. To my mind it is more dangerous to sit for one whole day in a room full of foul and improperly heated air than it is to risk the danger of contagion from smallpox. Some day, slowly moving public opinion will demand that the health of our school children shall be more carefully guarded.
In the foregoing I have said much about ventilating and heating buildings. In the minds of ignorant school authorities everywhere, heating and ventilating a school building are one and the same thing. It is true that the two things are interwoven and are generally treated together, but temperature alone is a subject presenting many interesting problems.
For a generation, perhaps, men have seen the need of contrivances whereby buildings may be heated by more effectual means than the old fire place and the more recent stove. Ingenuity has supplied the need. But there has arisen a new need and that is the controlling of the temperature of ‘our buildings?schools, churches, homes. School rooms should be neither too hot nor too cold. The temperature in such rooms should remain at practically the same point all the time. To attain that end has been one of the problems of the heating expert in recent years. No architect and no set of school authorities, who pretend to have even 108 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC a half-way notion of their responsibility, will construct a school building at the present time without providing for the very best means of controlling the temperature of the building. Control of the temperature may be any. one of three varieties,?automatic control, janitor control, or teacher control. The first is the best, the second system, janitor control of the temperature, may be almost as good as automatic control but is likely to be much worse. The poorest system of all is that in which the teacher is depended upon to see that the room is at the right temperature.
Teacher control of the temperature is the poorest, because the teacher who is thoroughly wrapped up in her recitations will forget to adjust dampers and cut-offs, and, being in the room, variations in temperature will not be so readily noticeable. A faithful janitor, if he is given the proper apparatus, can control the temperature of the school rooms better than the teachers. The automatic apparatus will do the work best of all.
The proper control of the temperature of the school room has two advantages. First, by holding the temperature at the right point there is an immense saving of fuel. Second, the keeping of a school room at an even temperature tends to secure the health and comfort of both teacher and pupils. To quote one authority, “A class room that is too cold causes physical discomforts which may result in ill health. A class room that is too hot is even worse. The average teacher will resort to an open window for relief. The draughts from these open windows are certain to bring on coughs and colds which only too frequently end in throat and pulmonary troubles. The cause of education is as much promoted by. hygienic surroundings and the physical comfort of pupils as by teachers and text-books.”
As ventilation and temperature are closely associated, so are temperature and humidity. The percentage of moisture in the air of the school room, we are told, has much to do with the amount of heat necessary to keep the occupants comfortable. The house atmosphere during the winter months in our country is about as dry as that of a desert. The drier the air in a room, the higher the temperature will have to be in order to insure physical comfort. School experiments in Boston indicate that a degree of humidity ranging from 40 to 50 per cent in the winter time is the best. In all experiments as to the right amount of heat necessary for a school room it must be borne in mind that the humidity of the atmosphere in the room has much to do with the problem. In the tests described below, however, the element of humidity was not considered.
Most authorities seem to agree that the temperature of school rooms should be kept uniformly, at seventy degrees. The Pennsylvania legislature passed in 1905 a very practical law governing the erection of school buildings. This law provides that all buildings shall be properly lighted, ventilated and heated, and that the buildings shall be “warmed to maintain an average temperature of seventy degrees Fahrenheit during the coldest weather.” Ihe only trouble with the law is the word “average” in the passage just quoted. A temperature ranging from sixty to eighty degrees might average seventy degrees but it would be very injurious to the health of the pupils. If the law should require an absolute temperature of seventy degrees, throughout all the hours of every school day during that part of the year when artificial heat is needed, it would come much nearer enforcing perfect conditions. The overheating of school rooms is probably the commonest form of misdemeanor along the line of failure to maintain the proper temperature. Fuel is plentiful and furnaces are made to do full duty in the way of consuming their daily toll. Americans generally keep their houses too hot. A school room that is too hot causes the children to perspire. Going forth into a cold atmosphere causes chilling. Manifold cases of disease follow such action. Low temperatures likewise produce evil effects. The physician is all too familiar with the harvest of sickness and death which the school room has prepared in hundreds of communities. Numerous as are the evil physical effects of keeping children in improperly heated school rooms, there are added mental effects which show themselves in the work of the pupils from day to day.
It has been said above that most authorities are agreed that a temperature of seventy, degrees is the proper one to maintain in the school room. That may be true in some localities. However, it is my firm belief that a temperature of sixty-eight degrees, or even slightly lower, would be far better, not only for the general health of the pupils of the schools but for the mental results obtained. I beileve this to be especially true of such a climate as has Indiana?considering the humidity that prevails there and other climatic conditions. If the individual never suffers himself to remain in an atmosphere heated above sixty-eight degrees he readily adjusts himself to the condition and is comfortable. Furthermore, he can do better mental work. It is the commonest kind of an observation that when a school room becomes too warm, the pupils become dull and listless. They do not work so readily nor so accurately. Usually the higher the temperature, the poorer the results. On the other hand, if a room is allowed to become too cold, the results are almost as poor. There is a happy medium somewhere on the thermometer and it is that medium which many efforts have been made to find.
Recently, in the school system with which the writer is connected some experiments were made of the effects of different temperatures on the work of pupils. These experiments were conducted in three different rooms, in three different buildings. The pupils were all of the sixth grade. The teachers, Messrs. B. G. Keicher, L. B. Lookabill and Frank McGeath, helped in the experiments. The pupils knew nothing of what was going on, except that they were asked to undergo occasionally certain mental tests. The effects of the different temperatures were noted. Some of the notes were as follows: Temperature of 80 degrees, the class was restless, dull and incapable of continued mental effort; 76 degrees, the class was dull and sleepy, penmanship was poor; 75 degrees, class was. dull and complained of the heat; 74 degrees, not quite so dull as above; 72 degrees, restless; 70 degrees, excellent work, cheerfulness in class; 68 degrees, best work, to-day seemed their best; 66 degrees, splendid work; 65 degrees, class happy and full of work, some complained about the room’s being cold; 60 degrees, too cold for good work, complained of the cold. On the first day of the test, one room was held for an hour at a temperature of 80 degrees, the second at 75 degrees and the third at 70 degrees. At the end of the hour a list of words for written spelling was given to each set of pupils, the same list in all three rooms. The average of the class on this list in the room at 80 degrees was 58.8; 75 degrees, 77; 70 degrees, 78.2. The cooler the room, the better the average. The difference here between 70 and 80 degrees in temperature caused a difference in scholarship average of 20 per cent.
The second day, all three rooms were held at 76 degrees. Another test in spelling was given. The averages were 74.5, 75.2 and 72.7 per cent. The averages were thus practically the same, there being a difference of only three per cent between the highest and the lowest. The averages were not as good as those of the day before in the two rooms having lower temperatures. Tlie third day, all three rooms were held at 74 degrees for an hour in the forenoon. A test in spelling was given. The averages were 78.7, 81 and 82.1 per cent The difference between the highest and the lowest was only four per cent. The general average of all three rooms was higher than those of the preceding two days and the temperature was lower. In the afternoon, the temperature of all three rooms was 65 degrees. This was cooler than the rooms had been before, and the pupils are reported to have had more energy and life. The averages were 82.7, 85.2 and 81.5 per cent. The general average of all classes was the highest yet and the temperature was the lowest. The last test tvas in spelling, as the others had been.
The fourth day, the three rooms were held at 68 degrees all afternoon. The pupils seemed to be at their best. Two tests were given. The first was in spelling just before recess, and the second was on a set of examples in the fundamental processes just before the close of school. With the same temperature in all three rooms, two of the classes received almost exactly the same per cents on the spelling test, while the third for a local reason fell lower. The averages were 58.6, 72.4 and 72.3 per cent. In the second test of the afternoon, the averages were 72.7, 91 and 90.6. The averages in two of the rooms were again almost identically the same, while the third fell below the others from another cause.
On the fifth day, two tests in arithmetic were given. For an hour the rooms were held at 70 degrees. The averages were 88.7, 83.5 and 88.4 per cent. The variation was only five per cent. In the second test, the temperatures were *0, 60 and 80 degrees. The averages were 86.1, 84.3 and 91.7. The examples given, it developed, were too simple to entail any severe test on the classes, and consisted in multiplying whole numbers of more than one digit by numbers of one digit.
The sixth day’s test was another one in arithmetic, involving work in decimals. The temperature was /2 degrees in all the rooms. The averages were 75.8, 90.5 and 80.9 per cent. The general average of all the classes in a temperature of 72 degrees was not so high as when the temperature of all three rooms was 70 degrees.
The seventh day involved two tests in arithmetic. The first temperature tried all around was 68 degrees, and the second 66 degrees. The averages in the first test were 86, 90 and 91.5. On the second test, they were 82.3, 94.5 and 88.8. The variations were not large. The general average of all the classes was higher at 68 degrees than at 66 degrees.
On the eighth day the last tests were given. Sixty-eight degrees was the temperature again in all the rooms. The averages were 68.9, 80 and 77.7. The test was in spelling, two different sets of words being given out. On the second set the averages were 75.5, 77.7 and 81.7 per cent. The variations again were not large.
These tests were somewhat crude and it may. be claimed for them that they do not prove much. However, in a general way, they seem to show that the best school room work can be done in a temperature ranging between 65 and 70 degrees. They also show that the more the temperature of a room rises above 70 degrees, or falls below 65 degrees, the poorer will be the work done in that room. Taken all around, with right conditions as to humidity, I should judge that a temperature of 68 degrees in the school room is the right temperature and that any wide variation therefrom for any considerable time is an injury to the welfare of the children committed to our care.
Another test of the effect of temperature was made in three third grade rooms. One of these rooms, because of a defective heating apparatus which failed to do the work required and was therefore being rebuilt, had for the period of about eight weeks a temperature averaging 66 degrees. One of the other two rooms had an average temperature of 70 degrees, and the third one about 71 degrees. Toward the close of this period, tests in arithmetic and English were given. The pupils in the coolest room received the best grades in both cases. There had been times when the one room was too cold for good work, but there never had been a time when the brains of the children were dulled because of the excessive heat. The children of the other rooms were listless at times because of the heat. During a good part of this time the pupils in the cool room attended only a half day while the others attended all day, In spite of the half day attendance, the pupils in the cool room excelled those in the hot rooms who attended all day.
During the same eight weeks the building in which this cool room was located had more or less trouble on account of not being able to keep the temperature up to 70 degrees. Tests were given simultaneously in this building and two others, in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades, as well as the third. In a total of thirteen tests in four subjects, the building with the lowest average temperature excelled either one or both of the others nine times.
Recent tests in certain English schools show that pupils can do good work in a temperature of 60 degrees, and that the best work was done with temperatures ranging through the sixties. The writer of this paper did not make many tests with extreme temperatures because of the danger of injury to the children. Children are frequently poorly clothed and consequently a little higher temperature may be required. Children coming from homes that are habitually overheated also demand more heat in the school room. Numerous differing conditions must be dealt with. The wise school authorities will bend every effort towards securing for the schools under their care heating appliances that can be easily, regulated or that regulate themselves. If the janitor or the teachers are to manage the amount of heat which enters a room, then the superintendent should see to it that accurate records of the temperatures are kept every day. Variations can be noted and corrections can be demanded. One of the important duties of the superintendent of school officers is to see that their buildings are not only heated, but heated properly. They can serve their patrons well by attending most faithfully to this matter during all the days of the year on which heating of the school rooms is required.
The results of heating school rooms improperly are hard to detect. They are so bound up with the results of improper ventilation that differentiation is almost impossible. But the evil effects of improper heating exist. In some future day. conditions will be improved, knowledge will take the place of ignorance, and the school room, instead of being a place of danger to the youth of our land, will of all places be the safest and best not only for the moral but also for the physical welfare of the child.
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