Is Fresh Air an Important Part of Attending School?

School trips often give children the chance to escape the stuffy classroom, but at the turn of the 20th century, some schoolchildren got to breathe in the fresh air on a daily basis.

So-called "open-air schools" became all the rage for an unfortunate reason: tuberculosis. Before the devastating disease was finally kept in check in the mid-1940s, it was a widespread terror, killing an average of 450 people every day in America alone. TB was a particular threat to younger people, especially if their schools were poorly ventilated. To counter the threat, some forward-thinking Germans established a school in a forest near Berlin, offering students a much fresher approach to learning than they could hope for in the grimy inner cities. The school's success prompted the open-air movement to spread quickly across Europe.

In 1908, the first American open-air school was built in Providence, Rhode Island, for youngsters who had been exposed to tuberculosis but weren't actively ill. Within a year, the school reported not only zero cases of the disease, but also that many of the students were healthier. More schools followed, and by 1918, 130 cities boasted at least one open-air school. Although advances in prevention and treatment of TB eventually ended the open-air movement, the disease is still one of the leading causes of death by infectious disease worldwide.

The terror of tuberculosis: