India has never been short of educational ambition. NEP 2020 and NCF 2023 are among the boldest reimaginings of a national education system attempted anywhere, and the country now hosts one of the world’s great concentrations of IB and Cambridge schools. And yet, this open letter to India’s school builders argues, the ambition often begins to thin the moment you walk past the reception area.
The prospectus promises inquirers, risk-takers, joyful learners, and confident young people. The building too often delivers sealed rooms, bells that end thought on schedule, and children moving at the instruction of adults through spaces they rarely get to choose. Policy and architecture, Prakash Nair and Dr. Parul Minhas contend, are not on the same side — and in that contest, the building usually wins.
It was never about the furniture
Pods, wobble stools, and writable tables can leave the deep structure of a school completely intact: one adult, one cohort, one sealed room, a bell that ends whatever is happening, and a timetable that slices the day into subjects. Rearranging furniture inside an unchanged cell, the authors write, is redecoration, not redesign. The real question for every founder, leader, and trustee is simpler and harder — does your building agree with your prospectus? Not in a vague, general sense, but attribute by attribute, promise by promise. The essay then holds the language of NEP 2020, NCF 2023, and even the IB and Cambridge frameworks against the sealed, single-subject classroom, and finds the architecture disagreeing with the policy before a single teacher has been appointed.
What keeping the promise looks like
Some schools already treat the physical environment as a curriculum decision rather than an infrastructure one. They are not defined by style or budget, but by a set of structural conclusions drawn from the curricula’s own words:
None of this is exotic, and much of it is not primarily a question of money. It is decided in the first month of a building project — in the brief, in the assumptions, and in the moment a founder, trustee, school leader, or architect chooses whether the school will be planned around rooms or around children. India is deciding this at national scale, thousands of times over. The leap it wants to make in education is real and within reach — but nobody leaps from inside a cell.