The brutalization of our society by noise is revealed by what we are doing to our children, exposing them to such excessive noise in their formative years that they tune out in self-defense and have to be educated to listen to verbal communication. The Mabaan children are taught to listen for self-protection. Educators have told me it is a commonplace in a city like New York that new pupils coming from low-income areas also have to be trained to listen. At home, amid probably many brothers and sisters demanding attention against the external noises of raucous street activities and heavy traffic, the children have heard speech chiefly as grunts, and had to pick even those out from among many other generalized human sounds. Apparently, in the act of screening out the destructive sounds of their environment, they have lost the art of focussing on speech sounds.
Pre-talking-age children who constantly hear noise-masked speech do not receive the full auditory value of the speech sounds in their surroundings. Consonants and vocal nuances are masked, filtered out, and the child learns an imperfect vocal pattern.
Tune-outs, especially among the underprivileged, growing up in noisy environments, may later become drop-outs.
But noise is becoming an economic equalizer, and all children are beginning to suffer. Well-to-do mothers seek apartments that face away from traffic, and they man the picket lines to oppose heliports and jetports.
As if to assure ourselves that our children will be prepared for tomorrow's noise-saturated world, we allow excessive noise to accompany them during their school hours. Most schools seem designed to be reverberation boxes. Hard floors and ceilings amplify the normal sounds of school activities. The students are sitting ducks for decibels. This is what one small-town Texas high school environment sounded like to a college professor of Health and Physical Education:
"In a single wing of the building, a half dozen classrooms are hammered with afternoon noises—Vocational Education classes. The efficiency and effectiveness of the lecture classes drop and the students strain to hear. Fatigue and irritability of students and teachers is great."
What happens to the quality of education when teachers are exposed to fatigue and irritation from noise? "I have found the noise to be an abomination," wrote one private-school teacher. "In the classroom, concentration is difficult and I have to raise my voice to be heard. I must choose between opening the window and not being heard or leaving the window closed and subjecting my pupils to stuffiness and sleepiness. After classes there is no relief. I live here at the school and cannot escape the noise [of construction going on in the vicinity] to relax after a trying day of teaching. Over a period of time, this has seriously interfered with my work, as my enthusiasm and effectiveness in the classroom is directly dependent upon complete relaxation during free hours."
Too many schools have been built near jetports, or vice versa, and aviation noise is lessening the efficiency of the educational process. So frequent are interrruptions from aviation, they are now clocked and inserted into the Congressional Record. The Superintendent of Schools of Inglewood, California, told a Congressional subcommittee:
"As for our instructional program, we must point out that oral communication becomes impossible each time a jet aircraft passes near our schools. This means that approximately 165 teachers and 4,000 students must stop all class discussion until the aircraft has progressed beyond the schools. The result of such disruption goes beyond the actual time involved in the passage of the aircraft and each class must again have its attention focussed on what was being done before the interruption.
...Our teachers tell us that as the number of jet planes increases they find classroom instruction increasingly difficult and it is their feeling that considerable loss in the educational program results."
Some school architects are now eliminating windows or planning underground classrooms.
Handicapped children suffer most. The impact of sudden noises on children with epilepsy and other diseases forces parents to seek forms of escape. One mother wrote me to inquire after a source for the acoustic earmuffs she had seen me demonstrate on television. "My son is extremely sensitive to loud noises, both sharp and sudden...There are many activities he would like to participate in—but due to this problem he cannot do so at this time. He seems to tolerate moderate noises but anything above a normal high or sharp tone disturbs him. He is a cerebral palsy boy with tension, and has a severe problem with loud and sharp noises."