School Culture

...is usually its own entity, and it more often than not doesn't mimic culture as a whole. This should not be the case. The reason, I think, many kids do not like school is because they do not find it relevant to their lives as a whole. I completely empathize with this. Instead of improving schools from the inside out, we need to work on improving them from the outside in. That is, look at society/culture as a whole and attempt to integrate it into the school environment. As things stand now, though, these two cultures are way too disparate to ever help kids connect one with the other. The most obvious example of this is the culture of reading, which is extremely prominent in schools, but virtually non-existent in the real world. Every day you see advertisements for consumer culture, including TV shows, movies, video games, food, and almost never for books. You rarely hear among people not in the field about the latest or greatest book they've read. But if we expect our children to not only accept but embrace reading, society as a whole has to encourage it. Before we can look at school reform, therefore, we need to look at societal reform. In grad school I read a book by Jean Anyon that discussed just that. I think it's something we should all aspire to, but certainly something that will require our patience.