PUBLIC SCHOOL VENTILATION.

Evening Star, Issue 3282, 27 August 1873, Page 3

PUBLIC SCHOOL VENTILATION.

On this subject the New York Herald has an article which our school committee may consider with advantage.:— “What goes into the stomach twice or thrice a day is considered of momentous importance ; but what goes into the lungs with every breath in no way concerns mankind, notwithstanding that digestion and respiration are so intimately connected as to bo inseparable, ‘ Inspiration is the last act of digestion and essential to it. Jn every twenty-four hours there flow to the lungs sixty hogsheads of air and thirty hogsheads of blood. The purity of the latter depends upon the purity of the former ; consequently indifference to the atmosphere by which we are surrounded is suicidal.’ Bays Baudelocque, a French writer—* It will invariably be found, on examination, that truly scrofulous disease is caused, by vitiated air, and it is not always necessary that there should have been a prolonged stay in sneb an atmosphere. Often a few hours each day is sufficient, and it is thus that persons living in the most healthy countr}' and passing the greater part of the day in the open air become scrofulous, because of sleeping in a confined place, where the air has not been renewed.’ Typhus fever is an especial product of foul air and as, by the law of ‘ sympathetic association,’ no one part of the body can be injured without detriment to all the rest, the evils wrought by imperfect ventilation are beyond computation. In no country are diseases of the digestive organs as prevalent as in America. Connection between stomach and brain being intimate, it follows that insanity must bo more frequent here than elsewhere, and though the major part of it be traced to an inordinate use of intoxicating liquors, let it be remembered that there is no greater encouragement to intemperance than a vitiated atmosphere. Sixty, eighty, and one hundred children are packed into rooms capable of decently accommodating but half as many. In some cases attempts have been made to provide means for the admission of fresh air orfoi the ejection of that which is impure ; but the architects of these devices have not realised the importance of combining the two movements, la moat of the schoolhouses windows are the only ventilators, but on damp or cold days it is manifestly unsafe to precipitate draughts directly upon the backs and heads of those pupils who, by the faulty construction of the assembly and recitation rooms are placed on a level with the window sills. Bid parents and teachers know that twenty times a minute the blood requires an additional supply of oxygen, without which the whole body suffers ; did they know that although the brain weighs but one-fortieth of the whole body, it receives one-fith of the blood flowing from the heart, and that at no time is dccarbouisation of the blood so imperatively demanded as during study hours; did they know that Jlistlessness, langour, irritability, want of appetite, and inaptitude for study necessary consequences of bad ventilation, perhaps a revolution might take place. Teachers should themselves be physiologically instructed in order to decide upon the sanitary condition of their schools, and to kcijualnt their pupils with tho laws of health,

It is superfluous to say that this important branch of education is entirely neglected. The problem of how to live is swallowed up in th- more popular one of how to calculate. The system is false, and requires reconstruction. Mathematics are not the sum and substance of existence. ‘The first thing in every efficient man is a fine animal,’ says Emerson. Much of the wrong apparent in IVew York public schools is undoubtedly owing to the local boards, composed, for the most part, of illiterate men, who owe their position to the votes of the sovereign people, and who are sadly incompetent to discus' matters of health and education.”