What School Should Be: On Culture

I want my kids to attend a school where it’s cool to be focused, smart, and kind.

Childhood and adolescence are strewn with land mines of distraction: bullying, hormones, peer pressure, social media, relational conflict, substance abuse, family strife, body image, and more. Harried school administrators can feel like their job has devolved into a perverse game of whack-a-mole.

The best schools obsess less about negative incidents and individual offenders and instead focus on building a positive school culture. These schools are not spritzing sanitizer on the cesspool. They are creating a petri dish with a pH that is inhospitable to pathogens. They are schools with cloudless expectations and neon boundaries. They are schools where it is okay to be an intelligent athlete, where it is is possible to be a popular nerd, and where bullies are regarded as insecure fools. They are schools where no name sounds funny (because they all sound funny), and where there is no default skin color.

Systems here are established to reward collaboration, character, and inclusion as well as individual achievement. From the top of the class to the bottom, a “do your very best” culture propels students toward the upper reaches of their God-given potential.