Noise Control at School – Are Our Kids missing their Education?

Noise Control at School – Are Our Kids missing their Education?
This article is about acoustical problems related to educational buildings, how things have gone wrong and how to mitigate the situation by noise regulations. To give a simple example, assume that you are preparing for an important subject and the textbook that you are reading has several serious omissions which leave you in despair. Of course, you will go to the book seller and demand a refund. Similar situations exist in acoustically poorly designed classrooms. Every day this problem is faced in numerous schools all over the nation. Words of teachers do not reach the students and they miss out important words of their teachers in classrooms and lecture halls. There is no ‘refund’ possible in such cases and year after year students continue to suffer.
Noise Control Problems
Problems due to high noise levels could be because of student indiscipline but there are other reasons also for high levels of noise in class rooms. Two main acoustic problems are discussed below:
Excessive Noise and Reverberation
Both these problems are direct causes for speech interference – and speech is the critical element in teaching necessary to be preserved in education. Even the smallest of whispers can get magnified due to too much of reverberation creating a mess of sound caused by continuous reflections off the surfaces of the classroom. This raises the overall sound level of the class room forcing the teacher to raise his or her voice even more so that he or she is heard. The raised voice of the teacher further makes the situation worse causing more reverberations and further loss of clarity of speech. Using a microphone can worsen the reverberation problem. If classrooms are not properly isolated, it can also lead to excessive noise. Open classrooms are not a solution either, because disturbing sounds from an adjoining class room can easily enter the neighboring class.
Noise Control and Young Students
Noise control is important for hearing impaired students as well as normal ones especially young students. In the formative stages of a child this is all the more detrimental. Missing even one word in the class can affect the child’s learning progress. Even older students need better noise control. For foreign students studying in universities with English as medium of instruction it is very important that the lecturer’s words are intelligible and for that noise control is important.
One of the reasons why the classrooms are in such bad state is because those responsible like architects and educators are unaware of noise problems and the solutions. The problems would not have arisen if proper materials and methods for noise control were used at the early construction stages of the buildings. Our students would have been benefitted with better learning environment and quality of education paving way for undisputable benefits both socially and economically.