[ The Times has an article on the enormous social impact from the loss of hundreds of schools in Haiti. Also relevant is my recent post and story on Istanbul’s efforts to strengthen schools and other public buildings before its next big quake.]

A Washington Post article on the hundreds of schools that collapsed when Haiti was rocked by the earthquake puts a fresh focus on the importance of providing a safe environment for learning, particularly in the poorest developing countries.

“Without education, we have nothing,” said Michel Renau, director of national exams at the Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sports, which itself is a rubble pile in the city center. “We’ve been set back very far. But if we pull ourselves together quickly, we’ll go on.”

As was explored here following the enormous toll in student (and teacher) deaths from the earthquake in China’s Sichuan province, this doesn’t take high technology or big budgets — simply adherence to well established norms for designing buildings to sway instead of crumble or pancake. ( A Haitian school collapsed under its own weight in November 2008, illustrating that basic lapses in building practices are widespread in poor countries.) There’s much more here on building safer schools.

One option for rural regions is using straw bales. Illustrating a way to use concrete and brick safely, Santiago Pujol, an earthquake engineer at Purdue, provided me with renderings showing how the same mix of materials, configured differently, can result in a far sturdier design. (Watch video of this design being tested on a giant “shake table.”)

Such structures can also be designed with aesthetics and sunlight in mind, as Dr. Pujol showed in a subsequent illustration:

Of course, the lessons here apply far beyond Haiti, given that tens of millions of children — from Istanbul to Oregon — are studying in schools that are already known to be what some earthquake engineers ruefully call “rubble in waiting.” Soon, I’ll be describing my recent visit to several Istanbul schools in various phases of retrofitting to help them withstand the next earthquake there. See the map below, from an earlier print story of mine, to note the number of kids in earthquake zones:

Below, as time allows, I’ll add input from experts on the challenges and opportunities facing Haiti in the months and years ahead as efforts are made to “build back better,” in the parlance of planners, engineers and seismologists who are part of a global movement to reduce losses from inevitable disasters. Here’s the first such comment.

Frederick Krimgold, the director of the Disaster Risk Reduction Program, Virginia Tech: