In 1842 Edwin Chadwick, a British social reformer, published his "Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population".By ing evidence of social and geographic inequalities in health, Chadwick showed that poor sanitation was associated with poor health. The report eventually led
British cities to organise clean water supplies and to centralise their sewage systems, in turn reducing the prevalence of infectious diseases, in particular clholera. Similar reforms around the world in the 20th century tackled food safety and outdoor-air pollution. Now a new public-health priority is becoming apparent: making indoor air cleaner.
Take schools. They are "chronically under-ventilated", according to the Lancet COVID-19 commission. A study of 100 American classrooms found 87 with worryingly low ventilation rates. Across Denmark, France, Italy, Norway and Swedern, researchers found that indoor-air quality in 66%of classrooms fell short of healthy standards.In America nearly one child in 13 has asthma——a condition triggered by allergens often found in schools. Outdoor-air pollution can penetrate inside buildings—childhood exposure can affect neurodevelopment and academic performance,and cause cancer.
The problem extends well beyond classrooms. Many people spend more than 90% of their time indoors.Researchers have linked under-ventilated spaces in buildings to a range of ailments—headaches, fatigue, shortness of breath, coughs, dizziness, nausea, and irritation of eye, nose, throat and skin. Poor ventilation has been blamed for increased absencees from work, decreased productivity and asthma.
The pandemic has brought a new urgency to the matter. The virus which causes COVID-19 spreads between people less by close contact and infectec surfaces and more by hitching a ride on aerosol particles from people's lungs that can linger in the air of an ill-ventilated room.
Indoor-air quality has attracted little government attention. But achieving clean, pathogen-free air in buildings and indoor public spaces is possible. Thefirst step is to give people more information on how well-ventilated their air is. Carbon-dioxide concer trations are a good proxy for ventilation, and cheap sensors to detect this gas in rooms could provide occupants with useful data on when to open windows or upgrade their air-conditioning systems. National iindoor-air-quality standards would help. One way to enforce them could be through ventilation certificates for buildings, similar to food-hygiene certificates that already exist for restaurants.
The bill for all this need not be huge. A recent study found that raising the standard of ventilation in all American elementary and secondary schools o the minimum level would cost less than 0.1% of the country's typical public spending on education. President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan assigns $123bn to improving school infrastructure and mentions ventilation as a priority. Other countries should follow suit.
Educational hierarchies invite ruthless competition. So we scratch and claw to get places in the exclusive schools and colleges whose graduates fill the top jobs. The most obvious pitfall of this competition is that only the privileged can reliablly access the lifetime of schooling needed to win:Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale together ty ically enroll more students from households in the richest I percent than from the entire bottom half.
At the same time， the pressure to get the best students leads schools astray. The glosy（虚有其表的；浮华的）marketing materials that colleges use to attract students are sometimes ridiculous. More seriously, the need to lure the most-desired privileged students away from competitors leads colleges to replace need-based financial aid with"merit scholarships."
The dominant role that rankings play in students'decisions about where to enroll makes all but the most elite colleges perpetually insecure.Rankings, one dean has said, "are always in the back of [every administrator's] head. With every issue thatcomes up, we have to ask, 'How is this impacting our ranking?""Schools hire rankings consultants to tell them how to improve. The responses don't serve educational excellence,or really any educational purpose at all,and educators resent them.
Another pitfall of competitive education is that it distorts students'choices of what skills to acquire. When schooling is the path to income and status,students study the subjects that yield the highest wages and the greatest prestige, inducing too mary people to study finance and law and too few to study education, caregiving, or even engineering. E ut private wages are not the same thing as the public interest.
Child-care workers,for example,give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as theycapture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give. The distortions reach beyond specific jobs. Art, culture,and community all make the world a much better place, but they are notoriously difficult to monetize in the market. Competitive schooling therefore drives students away from these fields.
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