Paint or build a real school?

We build new schools. Or refurbish old ones. And in all this endeavor - sometimes sincere, sometimes merely aesthetic - an essential question is forgotten: for whom? Who is at the center of it all? Who lives, breathes, learns, grows up in these buildings? The pupil and the teacher, often treated as spectators of their own school.

The reality is that whether we are talking about a Cambridge or a neighborhood school, a Romanian or an international model, the need is the same: warm, welcoming, bright, bright spaces. Spaces that do not impose, but support. That do not close, but connect. Spaces designed around a simple and profound question: how do we help people connect with each other and with what they learn?

We still have hastily painted schools, with furniture ordered overnight, without a color scheme, without a thought about what kind of state we want to create there. Making or remaking a school is about time, patience, dialog, functional and c