The admissions files / Open-air classrooms · 1908–1911
The school day comes with a blanket
In the early open-air classroom, keeping up with lessons could involve a warm stone for your feet.
In January 1908, school officials in Providence, Rhode Island, took an ordinary four-walled classroom and left one wall open to the winter air. The children kept their outdoor wraps on and sat in bags made for sitting out in the cold. On cold days, they also had warm soapstones for their feet. I keep coming back to the stones. Somewhere before the first lesson, I assume, a grown-up was heating them.
Most parents know the expanding winter child. First the coat, then the hat, then the mittens, then the discovery that the first mitten vanished during the putting-on of the second. Now add a bag to sit in and a stone to rest the feet on. At some point you have stopped dressing a child and started upholstering one. Then someone is also minding the toes, which I find a touching amount of trouble.
There was a serious reason for all this. The first forest school opened just outside Berlin in 1904, for children described as sickly and undernourished, in a pre-antibiotic world where tuberculosis was a constant public fear. Their days held meals, rest and play along with lessons, and as much as possible happened outdoors. Fresh air was one of the things adults of that era reached for, alongside food and rest. When Leonard Ayres described a school of this kind near Berlin in 1910, he noted that after the midday dinner the children lay down or dozed for two hours.
New York has a photograph from this movement that I could look at for a long time. The Library of Congress catalogs it as a rest hour at Public School 51 in Manhattan, 1911: children wrapped in blankets, lying on cots.
A room changes character when everybody lies down. It stops asking anyone to sit up straight. A grown-up looking at that picture might feel a brief wish to be enrolled. There are worse things to find on a timetable than permission to stop trying for a while.
By the time the idea spread through American cities, open-air classes were turning up on rooftops and ferryboats. A schoolroom could apparently have a surprising address, so long as someone had thought about the cold.
It is the small provisions that stay with me. A lesson needs a teacher and something worth learning. A child may also need a meal, a place to lie down, and someone who has noticed the temperature. You can pour a great deal of educational ambition into a room. Sometimes the most persuasive thing in it is a warm stone.