An environmentally prohibitive learning environment
On sensors, air-conditioned classrooms, and the accommodations we must accept if we want to make the future better despite climate change
Teachers and parents in the Catalonia region of Spain have been establishing a sensor network inside classrooms to monitor the indoor temperatures experienced by students and faculty. And the results are problematic: Kids are going to school in temperatures as high as the mid-30s (Celsius), which converts to the 90s (Fahrenheit). It’s happening in multiple classrooms, not just in isolated individual outliers.
■ Those are indoor temperatures -- and there’s no number of fans that can possibly be installed to make those rooms tolerable. It’s a plain and inescapable fact that at certain temperatures, particularly indoors, people become less able to get their jobs done -- including the jobs of teaching and learning.
■ The effects of heat on productivity are making news in India, too, where the temperatures are cutting into factory productivity by as much as 10%.
■ There are scolds and puritans out there who would say that humans have created the high temperatures by burning fossil fuels and causing anthropogenic climate change, and thus humans should be punished. But not only is that wildly unfair to the schoolchildren (who made none of the choices that led to the climate change), it’s self-defeating: Things aren’t going to get better if misery is the only outcome that counts.
■ This means that we will have to act in a way that mirrors the classic admonition that “You have to spend money to make money”. In this case, in the process of trying to rectify past wrongs that resulted from burning too many fossil fuels, we will have to accept some accommodations along the way (like spending on air conditioning systems and the electricity needed to run them) on our way to mitigating or reversing the impact of past environmental wrongs. Things aren’t going to get better if we leave students to roast in classrooms where it’s too hot to learn. We can’t expect progress if we subject the next generation to environmentally prohibitive learning environments.