The colours are often dull, cheap as schoolroom paints from yesteryear, greyed, yoghurty, intractable and flat.
Ever since the 1970s Silicon Valley's visionaries have been claiming that their industry would change the schoolroom as radically as the office and they have sold a lot of technology to schools on the back of that.
Those who remember their schoolroom physics may recognise what is going on here.
Japan's past hardly seems relevant any more, except for the memory that it is the only nation to have suffered nuclear attack.Beyond pity at seeing residents of a rich, proud country scavenging for food, hoarding bottled water and huddling for shelter on schoolroom floors, it was hard not to feel admiration as well.
She said she wanted to continue her studies, and a schoolroom was made available in the palace for her and her Japanese tutor.
They tend to be good schools, so many middle-class parents who do not speak Welsh patronise them.As a result, says Colin Williams, a Cardiff University linguist, the schoolroom is replacing the home as the main pillar of the language.
But they certainly serve to enliven what a more leaden pen would turn into a schoolroom exercise of memorisation and lexicography.
He agreed, for instance, to the savagery of summary trials and executions: a schoolroom was converted into a court and executions took place on the roof.
But nor is there any doubt that America's future lies with the people who are trying to expand opportunity rather than those who are trying to bar the schoolroom door.
The schoolteacher, Solomon Ming, busily shepherds his little charges back to their schoolroom after a free lunch.
And fourth, there are settings the schoolroom, the courthouse in which the wearing of Muslim veils can be intimidating or offputting to pupils or juries.Some of these arguments are stronger than others, but none supports a blanket Dutch-style ban.
