I would hazard a guess that it has to do with a lot of American schools being made during the Cold War, and designed to double as emergency shelters.

That was the impression I always got from my 1984-built Elementary school building. It was all concrete block construction with odd roof angles taken low to the ground. Many fond memories of using the Macintosh LCs in a completely-windowless freezing-cold chamber in the center of the building.

Not just the cold war. My elementary school was originally from the early 20th century and it had the vestiges of the subsequent wars: bomb shelter signs, eerie hallways without windows, heavy metal doors to transition between sections of the building.

> My elementary school was originally from the early 20th century and it had the vestiges of the subsequent wars: bomb shelter signs, eerie hallways without windows, heavy metal doors to transition between sections of the building.

Some/all of that have less to do with war and more to do with general disaster preparedness.

* Bomb shelters provide shelter from...bombs, yeah

* Windowless hallways provide shelter from tornadoes (no glass to break/become shrapnel)

* The heavy metal doors are firewalls that automatically close when the alarm goes off (most are hollow, won't do shit against assault weapons and predate even Columbine)

You know, that might actually be a reasonable explanation.

The doors are part of the response to massive gun ownership in the US. To try to keep schools safer, many have airlock-style entrances, metal detectors, and other systems to try to prevent people with guns from getting inside.

Uh, no. They had the massive metal doors 40-50 years ago. Metal detectors are new, but the designs are older then 99% of people on this site.

Doesn't this vary widely? I don't see how the schools I went to were like prisons.

An example: most schools in northeastern US are built around windowless hallways; most schools in the southwest and California have classrooms that open directly into the outdoors, with mezzanines, walkways, and staircases exposed directly to the elements.

Which one is supposed to be prison-like? Both just seem like utilitarian architecture to me (and so are prisons I guess). You don't want students to have to walk out in the elements between rooms in the middle of winter in New York, and you'd want to maximise the number of windows that classrooms have (since that's where students spend the majority of their day), so where else would you put hallways?

I suppose you could put windows between the classrooms and hallways, but those have their own associated problems to overcome: increased noise, more windows for students to break, safety in emergency situations, etc.

As for non-connected classrooms, where you need to walk outside to go between rooms, I've always thought that was to solve the same problems. Cheaper to build/renovate/modify/expand, easier to clean, less noise and fewer students running into each other.

The east coast school hallway is more prison-like, by far. There's a reason it's a horror movie cliche. Windowless, clinical, institutional, often with tiles on the walls and floor to make cleaning easier.