The Progressive Teacher Vol 06 Issue 01

INCLUSIVE AND
LIFE-ORIENTED
SCHOOL CULTURES
Dr. Jeny Rapheal
Children are endowed with
an innate capacity to absorb
the culture into which they
are born. An efficient school
system meticulously weaves its culture
in such a way that students can absorb
it with minimum friction. Students may
face a dilemma when they perceive a
grave mismatch between the culture they
are born into and the school’s culture.
School cultures must seek for adequate
compatibility between the subcultures
at home and the community. A school’s
relevance begins to fade when its culture
has nothing to do with the expectations of
the community.
Hazards of performance-oriented
culture
Fundamentally, school culture is shaped
by the vision of the school and the kind
of education it wants to impart. If a
school focuses on academic performance,
specifically the grade or marks the student
scores in the examination, its culture will
have a “demanding” tone. Such schools
will have some pre-determined standards
or criteria and will expect the students to
fit into it if they want to be appreciated and
approved by the teachers. In the process,
students’ natural innate propensities are
overlooked. This is suffocating for the
students as they are always surrounded by
an air of competition and not of excitement
or experimentation. Students’ self-esteem
will suffer tremendously whenever they
fall short of their friends and lose their
place in the first row. Many who pass
out from such institutions carry a flawed/
immature personality and may develop
some psychological issues.
Fear-driven school culture
Why do most schools become performance
oriented? Performance oriented culture
grips a school when it is in a survival
mode. For a school to be in the good
books of parents, it must produce enough
pass percentage year after year. Parents
always prefer schools which show the
maximum number of A-graders or cent
percentage result. If a school can’t rise
up to the parental expectations, it is in
an existential threat, especially when
educational institutions are spawning like
mushrooms in every nook and corner of
the country.
This struggle permeates into all activities
of the school and the noble act of
teaching too is not spared from its grip.
Once teacher’s perception is marred by
anxiety over producing maximum pass
percentage, she begins to function like
a robot programmed to train students’
brain to regurgitate clear-cut, readymade
answers right from the memory bites in
their heads, for the questions which are
likely to be tested in the examination.
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