Education: Noise & Boys

New York's prodigious crash-bang-rattle-screech, in the estimation of Health Commissioner Shirley Wilmott Wynne, engenders juvenile neuroses. The city's Noise Abatement Commission has found classrooms in nearly one-third of the public schools so din-ridden as to be virtually useless. In its researches the Commission (which does no actual abating but carries on investigations of noise) uses the "decibel," which measures differences between sounds and absolute silence. One decibel represents a sound just audible. Ten decibels make one "bel" (named for the late Inventor Alexander Graham Bell), which represents roughly the amount of sound lost when transmitted over one mile of telephone wire. For convenience the decibel and not the bel is used in U. S. researches. A quiet home registers 40 decibels. Normal loudness of human conversation is 60. Upward, toward 100, noise becomes increasingly plaguy and bothersome. Some noises, measured in decibels, which may wrack the nerves, dull the minds of New York school children:

Hammering on a steel plate (almost painful) 113

Automobile horn 102

Riveter 101

Subway 97

Elevated Train 91

Street Car 83

Radio Loud Speaker 81

Passenger Automobile (quiet) 65

Last week the Noise Abatement Commission set up its noise-making gadget (3A audiometer) in Riverdale Country School at Riverdale-on-Hudson, N. Y. For four days 200 boys, divided in two groups, were bothered during daily one-hour examinations by loud noise (70 decibels), moderate noise (55) and plain ordinary room noise (30 to 35). The boys grew tired, their work grew worse in proportion to the noise. Conditions were better than in the average city school, for no attempt was made to duplicate the sharp sudden noises of traffic at its peak. The Riverdale boys could endure monotonous noise for a time, but the moderate kind soon became almost as irksome as the loud.

In Cooperstown, N. Y. is the Beasley School which teaches boys to concentrate by the very means which the Noise Abatement Commission deplores. Beasley School was founded in 1928 by Chauncey Haven Beasley, onetime Latin teacher at Pomfret, inventor of Golfits Latine which makes a parlor game of declensions and conjugations. Headmaster Beasley, aware that most businessmen must work amid distracting noises, devised two years ago a Concentration Course which has now become his school's chief feature. Every day, first thing in the morning, his 31 students (aged 8 to 16) meet and concentrate together. Older boys get harder work than young ones, are graded more severely. In the beginning, concentrators peruse or hear read for three minutes a single paragraph, such as one dealing with the palindrome ("Madam, I'm Adam"). Then for seven minutes they mull over questions based on the paragraph, while their teachers endeavor to muddle them by conversing loudly. Later the class lasts longer—15 minutes for study, 15 for answers—with harder work to do: mathematical examples, psalms or poetry to be learned, a picture to be gazed at. The distractions get worse & worse: a vacuum cleaner buzzing, an alarm clock, a phonograph record.