What Is School For?

Last week I gave the opening keynote at COEARTH Conclave 2.0, a gathering of architects and educators exploring the relationship between education and the spaces in which it happens. Standing before a room full of architects, I decided not to begin with architecture. I began with a question: What is school for?

It seems almost too obvious to ask. Yet every answer to that question produces a different kind of school. And eventually, a different kind of building. That became the thread running through the day.

I suggested that every school is built twice. First as an educational idea. Only later as a building. Architecture does not begin with walls or windows. It begins with an answer to the question, What is school for?

The conversations that followed showed me just how rich that question can become.

Bijoy Ramachandran spoke about the importance of liminal spaces. The corridors, courtyards, verandas and thresholds where little seems to happen, yet where so much learning actually takes place. Schools are not only collections of classrooms. They are landscapes of encounter. Sometimes the most important conversations happen between lessons rather than during them.

Pooja Khairnar demonstrated that thoughtful educational architecture has remarkably little to do with extravagant budgets. Through examples of her work from rural India, she showed how schools built under severe constraints can nevertheless become places of beauty, dignity and delight. Good architecture is not simply about spending more. It is about understanding more deeply what a place is trying to enable.

Anand Sonecha described the challenge of designing a school for children with visual impairments. Navigation could no longer rely primarily on sight. Instead, the building itself had to communicate through touch, sound and smell. It was a powerful reminder that architecture is always teaching us how to inhabit a place, even when we barely notice it.

Siddhartha Menon, trustee of the Krishnamurti Foundation of India and former principal of Rishi Valley School, offered an image that will stay with me. Education, he said, is like driving a chariot pulled by two horses. One develops our cognitive capacities: knowledge, reasoning and intellectual skill. The other nurtures our inner life: attention, relationship, compassion and self-understanding. Modern education has become exceptionally good at feeding one horse while neglecting the other. Yet both are needed if education is to remain fully human.

Listening to these talks, I realised that although each speaker approached the subject from a different direction, they were all responding to the same underlying question: What is school for? If school is primarily about transmitting knowledge, we design one kind of building. If it is about inquiry, we design another. If it is about apprenticeship, community or belonging, architecture changes again. Buildings do not produce learning, but they make some forms of learning easier than others. That may have been the most important insight I took away from the conference: architecture is educational philosophy made inhabitable.

The buildings we construct express our beliefs about learning. They communicate who belongs, who speaks, who collaborates, who waits, and what kinds of relationships are possible. Every wall, every courtyard, every library and every threshold embodies an answer to the question we sometimes forget to ask.

If I had to answer the question today, I would say that school exists to help us remember what matters, to see ourselves and the world afresh, to discover what gives life meaning, and to become capable of living it well.

That is why conversations about school design should never begin with square footage, furniture or materials. They should begin with purpose. Because every school is built twice: first in our imagination, and then in brick, timber and concrete.

Or perhaps three times.

The final construction happens slowly, over years, in the lives of the children who pass through those spaces. Ultimately, that is where every educational idea, and every architectural decision, reveals its true shape.