Most schools have all the classrooms on a perimeter so they get light. If there's a courtyard there will likely be classrooms on the interior as well. Rooms without windows tend to be intentionally reserved for things like artistic use (no windows to open to screw with humidity that some materials might not like), music (you can plaster all the walls in sound deadening.

You don't tend to get windowless classrooms until decades after the building was built and the school is simply making due with the facilities they have in light of their changing needs. They'll shove a math class in a former art room or something.

Back in the day windowless rooms were somewhat coveted because everyone had lesson plans on transparencies and they'd teach using the overhead projector the way some teachers use a PowerPoint today. Being able to turn down the lights (and not have the sun defeat your efforts) and then have the projector be the main focus helps keep the class on-task and keeps the teacher in better control of rowdy classes because the people who would drift off topic and engage in distracting chit-chat tend to drift off to sleep instead.

I am surprised about your comment. What do you find hard to believe? I am from (western) Germany, and I find it hard to believe, that there are class rooms without windows. Except for one or two special purpose rooms, in my school time, I have never ever seen a class room, which didn't have windows on one long side. The other long side would be towards the hallway. The rooms almost never needed artificial lighting (unless in the first hour in the Winter or really bad weather) and plenty of fresh air when opening the window. Daylight and fresh air are the best ways to keep the pupils awake.

I could probably dig some up from high school, but I think they're all on an external drive. And none of them are panoramic, of course.

But yup, many rooms had no windows; just a big cinderblock room, the only window being by the door, opening into the hallway.

It was a photo posted by a user from his actual classroom on a reddit thread some time ago, don't have that exact link available anymore, but a very quick search drove me to this more recent reddit thread [1] which describes the same issue.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/6kcily/my_new_cla...

On mobile, but I was kinda shocked to see it when I lived in Pittsburgh. Google “Obama Academy Pittsburgh” for one example, but I was not at all alone in the area.

My school in the US had no windows in quite a few classrooms. I guess that’s what happens when you take an empty building designed for offices and divide it up into classrooms. It also had terrible ventilation. Many rooms would absolutely stink with the humidity unleashed from pubescent armpits, and the air conditioning was not up to the task.

My high school got renovated with another row of classrooms next to the original two. So a bunch of classrooms lost their windows. It went from 1 hallway to 2 parallel hallways.