How Old School Building Photos Help Kids Understand Belonging (A Look at La Martiniere Boys College)
The photos arrived in a text from my brother at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday: seven JPEGs of our old school, La Martiniere Boys College in Kolkata, taken during his recent trip home. The first image was the frontage—the grand red brick facade, the clock tower, the arched verandas, the enormous trees pressing against the boundary wall. I sat on the sofa and scrolled through them slowly, the way you eat something familiar from childhood—testing each bite for its original taste.
What struck me first is how the building looks same-yet-different. It’s still imposing, in that Victorian-Gothic way that makes you feel like a small thing approaching something large. My brother wrote, “The bell still sounds exactly the same.” For some reason, that detail landed the hardest. I could hear it. Not just the tone, but the specific echo it made across the courtyard, and the way a moment of near-silence would follow, briefly, before two hundred boys started talking over it.
I wasn’t planning on showing the photos to my daughter. She’s seven, and she goes to a perfectly good primary school in Delhi that looks like every other primary school in Delhi: three storeys, white paint, metal gates, tiered assembly area. But she saw the phone in my hand and climbed onto the couch to look.
“Daddy, why is that building so old?”
That moment made me realise how rarely children are asked to think about the buildings they occupy for six hours a day. They arrive, they sit, they play, they leave. The architecture of school is about as visible to them as air is to a fish. I told her it was where I studied as a boy, and that it opened in 1836. She asked what playground I played in. I showed her the photo of the ground floor courtyard, where the stone floor was worn smooth in certain lanes from decades of footfall. She didn’t ask anything more. She just lay her finger flat on her chest—the screen, not the image—and tapped.
I kept thinking about that courtyard long after she went to bed. There was one particular slab near the water fountain that had a notch in its edge from some forgotten construction, and I remember pressing my foot into it during morning assembly, treating it as a personal anchor point. Was that meaningful? I think it was more meaningful than anyone ever acknowledged back then.
A school building isn’t a backdrop to education. It is a participant in it. For boys at La Martiniere where I spent eleven years, the physical building taught certain lessons before any teacher could get around to them. The high ceilings meant your voice carried, so you learned to modulate it. The staircases were narrow, so younger boys learned to get out of the way quickly. The old wooden benches creaked under weight, and that taught patience. The long corridors had an echo that carried conversations, so you learned quietly. None of these things were part of any formal curriculum, but they were learned. Concretely. Daily.
When I became a parent, I assumed school buildings mattered in an abstract sense—safety, ventilation, functional classrooms. But I never actively considered how the built environment shapes a child’s inner landscape. My daughter’s school is fine. It is functional, clean, and bright in the way affordable modern Indian schools are bright. But it has no memory. No depth. There is no corner where you could believe another child stood fifty years ago, having exactly the same anxious thought, and then felt the stone wall steady them.
Should that matter to a parent? I think the honest answer is that it depends on the child. Some kids are orientation-sensitive; they attach to places quickly. Others don’t. But what I have come to understand, standing with my phone in my hand, is that in an era of screens and constant distraction, helping children consciously connect with their school environment is a low-cost way to build a sense of belonging—and that sense is quietly foundational to their willingness to learn.
If you are a parent and your child attends a school with a nondescript building, that isn’t a tragedy. But it does mean the school is doing less of the emotional work for you, so someone has to fill the gap. Here are concrete, small things that are worth trying—things I’ve started doing myself.
First, walk the perimeter with your child in the first month of a new school year. Don’t rush it and don’t narrate it like a tour guide. Just walk slowly and let them touch things. A boundary wall, a railing, a particular tree in the corner of the playground. Pick one feature and ask them a single question: “Where is a quiet spot you might go if you felt worried?” You are not mining for an answer so much as inviting your child to build an internal map. The physical spot will matter long after the worry fades.
Second, talk about the history of the school—no matter how ordinary that history is. Most Indian schools have at least one small fact worth knowing: who started it, what the land used to be, or even a Nostalgic piece of gossip like which class crop the first mango tree on the campus. Knowing one piece of history about a place dramatically increases a child’s sense of ownership over it. “My school existed before me” is a surprisingly comforting thought for many kids; it normalises the idea that they are entering a stream, not starting a lonely journey.
Third, use photographs at home. I have since printed two of my brother’s photos of La Martiniere and put them in my daughter’s study corner. She doesn’t remark on them, but she glances at them. I don’t need her to go to Kolkata and stand in that courtyard. I just want her to understand that buildings carry people’s stories, and that her own school is carrying hers right now.
The last photo in my brother’s messages is one I hadn’t expected. It’s a shot of a wall beside the entrance gate, where a thick layer of old paint has cracked and peeled off in shapes that look like the map of a country that doesn’t exist. I remember staring at that exact crack when I was ten, waiting for my father to pick me up, certain he would be late. He was usually late. The crack was a reliable friend. It was always there, always the same, and its fixity was a strange comfort.
There is a line I read once, by an architect who I can no longer name, that says buildings are slow forms of time. I think that’s true. When I gave my daughter the phone to look at the photos, I asked her: “Did you feel safe there, in that huge old building?” I didn’t know how to answer it. I still don’t. But I know I am glad I was asked, and I am glad there were photographs to ask through.
The bell still sounds exactly the same. And yet it doesn’t sound for me anymore. I don’t need to resolve that contradiction. I just need to keep showing her the pictures, telling her what happened near the fountain, and letting her build her own cracks and corners. That is probably enough.
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