Part 32

Next to the top of a knoll, the southerly slope of a hill is to be chosen. The building should not be overshadowed by a hill, especially on the western side. Trees are not to be planted close to a building in which children live, and ivy and similar plants should not be permitted to cover the walls.

If a building is set in a hollow it will be surrounded with chill air and mists in the cold seasons, even if a costly drainage system keeps the cellar and basement dry.

A gravelly or sandy soil beneath a building is the best, provided this soil is not already saturated with organic matter, or is not close above a dense layer of clay or rock. Clay, marl, peat, and made soils should be avoided if possible, because they are full of organic matter; they are cold, and they infect the ground air. Rock does not make a good building site--its seams carry water.

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The subsoil should be drained four or six feet below the cellar floor, and this floor is to be laid in concrete and cement. At the level of the ground there should be a course of hollow vitrified brick to exclude dampness and to give ventilation.

Limestone walls conduct more heat in and out than an equal thickness of glass, bricks, plastering, and wainscoting. The porosity of the building material determines the interchange of the air through the walls, and it affects the temperature of the rooms. If there is water in the pores of the walls heat is conducted rapidly, but air is not permitted to pass. Brick as a building material has many disadvantages, but on the whole it is best for schools, and it resists fire better than most stones. The harder the brick the better it is--vitrified brick is the best. Hard-pressed brick of a light colour makes an excellent outer wall-surface.

It is very doubtful that sewer gas escaping into a house will directly carry the micro-organisms of diseases like typhoid and diphtheria, but such gas is poisonous, depressant, and it renders the inmates of a house liable to disease; lessens their power of resistance. The typhoid bacillus and other bacteria can, of course, be carried into a cellar by the seeping in of drainage water. Infants kept in the upper story of a house in hot weather are more liable to intestinal diseases than are those that live on the lower floors, but here the weakening agent is heat. Tuberculosis, scrofula, rheumatism, neuralgias, bronchial, and kidney affections are made worse in damp houses.

The chief defects in plumbing and drainage are the following: (1) Earthen pipe drains become broken or their joints leak, and they saturate the ground under a house with sewage. (2) Tree roots break and clog drain pipes. (3) The pipes sometimes have not fall enough. (4) Drains without running traps admit sewer gas. (5) Rats burrow along a drain pipe from the sewer into the house and admit sewer gas. (6) When the soil pipe from a water-closet is exposed in cold weather it may freeze up or be clogged by urinary deposits. (7) Rats gnaw through lead pipes and joints. (8) Two or more closets or sinks with unventilated {204} traps on the same pipe will siphon back sewage. (9) Overflow pipes sometimes have no traps and they let in gas. (10) Ash pits near a house carry moisture to walls, (11) Cesspools leak through the soil.

In planning a school-building the classrooms and the study-halls are the first things to be considered. The classrooms should be oblong, with the aisles running lengthwise. Each child should have at the least 15 square feet of floor space and 200 cubic feet of air space. A room 30 by 25 feet with a ceiling 13 feet from the floor will serve for 48 pupils and no more. This is the best size for a room when blackboards and maps are used in teaching, because a larger room sets the children in the back seats too far away to see without eye-strain.

Dormitories should have at the least 300 cubic feet of air space for each child, and great care is to be taken in the ventilation. Children about 10 years of age require 11 hours of sleep; under 13 years, 10-1/2 hours; under 15 years, 10 hours; under 17 years, 9-1/2 hours; under 19 years, 9 hours. Do not make children get out of bed before seven o'clock in the morning; do not let them study before breakfast, and do not force them to work after half-past eight or nine o'clock at night until they are at the least 17 years of age. The hours for work should be:

Ages Hours of work a week

From 5 to 6 6 6 to 7 9 7 to 8 12 8 to 10 15 10 to 12 20 12 to 14 25 14 to 15 30 15 to 16 35 16 to 17 40 17 to 18 45 18 to 19 50

Work given for punishment must be included in these hours. No one, even an adult, should study for more than two hours at a time without an intermission for a few {205} minutes. In a boarding-school no one under any pretext, even on rainy days, should be permitted to study during recreation hours, and the deprivation of recreation to make up lessons is a relic of barbarism. If a teacher can not get class work done except by shutting up children during recreation hours, remove the teacher or expel the pupil.

The amount of glazed window surface admitting light to a classroom or study-hall should be from one-sixth to one-fourth the floor space of the room, and this must be increased if the light is obstructed by neighbouring houses or trees. The light is to be admitted on the left side of the pupils,--all other windows should be counted as ventilators only. Windows facing the children or the teacher are to be avoided. In rooms fourteen feet high a desk twenty-four feet from a window is insufficiently lighted. The larger the panes of glass the better, and the external appearance of windows is to be sacrificed to good lighting. If screens are used to protect the glass from stone-throwing, allowance is to be made for the light the screens cut off.

If a room can not have enough light from the left side alone, put the additional windows on the right so that their lower sills will be eight feet from the floor; and be careful in this case that the light from the right is not brighter than that from the left.

Windows should have as little space as possible between them to avoid alternate bands of shadow and light. Set them up as near the ceiling as possible, since the higher they are the better the illumination; and they should not be arched at the top. The lower window sills may be about four feet from the floor. When window shades are used to cut off direct sunlight, they should be somewhat darker in colour than the walls.

If artificial light is used in boarding-schools in the study-halls, the best light is one that is as near in colour as possible to the white light of the sun, and ample, but not glaring. It should be steady, and it should not give out great heat nor injurious products of combustion. Hence the electric light is the best; after that, gas through Welsbach {206} or Siemens burners. Well refined kerosene oil gives a good light, but it is always dangerous. Acetylene gas is now used in a safe apparatus, and it also is an excellent light.

No colour that absorbs light should be used on the walls. Pale greenish gray, nearly white, is the most satisfactory colour. There should be no wall paper, curtains, or hangings of any kind in a school or college building. The wall decorations should be as plain as possible, with no roughened places to catch dust.

Stairways are to be well lighted; they should be at the least five feet wide, and have landings half-way between each story. Diagonal or spiral stairways are dangerous. Steps with six-inch risers and eleven-inch treads are the easiest for children, but six-and-a-half-inch risers may be used in high schools and colleges.

Carbonic acid in the air of a classroom is an index of impurity. External air has about three parts of carbonic acid in 10,000 parts of air, and above seven parts in 10,000 is injurious. Each person exhales about fourteen cubic feet of carbonic acid gas in an hour. There is no easy method of determining the quantity of carbonic acid gas present in a room, and we must therefore arrange the ventilation so that about 3000 cubic feet of fresh air an hour will be supplied to each person in the house.

Beside carbonic acid there are other impurities in house air, as dust, micro-organisms of disease, exhalations from bodies, sewer gas, and the like, which accumulate and do injury when the ventilation is defective.

If every person in a house has 1000 cubic feet of air space, natural ventilation will suffice ordinarily, but artificial ventilation is needed in schoolrooms and dormitories. The subject of ventilation can not be satisfactorily discussed in a short article, and those that are interested in school building should leave the matter to a competent architect, or study books and articles like J. S. Billings' Ventilation and Heating, Pettenkofer's Ueber Luft in den Schulen, and Kober's article on House Sanitation in the Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences.

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The proper heating of a schoolroom is a matter so generally understood that there is no need for special remark here, except this, that provision for proper humidity in the heated air is commonly neglected.

Cheap water-closets do not save money--they get out of order too easily. The pan, valve, and plunger hoppers are not to be tolerated. The only kind to use are short-hopper closets with a trap that opens into the soil-pipe above the floor. These may have valve-lifters attached to the seats, because children forget to flush the hoppers. The ventilation of the water-closets should be separate from that of the main building. In country places where vaults are used, there should be a supply of dry loam kept, and enough of this to cover the fresh contents should be thrown into the vaults every evening.

Children are seemingly always thirsty, and they should be allowed to have all the drinking water they want if the source is free from typhoid germs and infection by organic matter. Common cups are an abomination, and a prolific cause of contagious diseases. Each child should have its own cup.

The rules for desks and seats for children are these:

1. The height of the seat should be about two-sevenths of that of the body.