Turning Schools From Institutions Into Communities

The term ‘school community’ gets bandied around a lot by educators, without a real understanding of what community truly means. Communities are built around unity instead of uniformity, collaboration instead of competition, and interdependence instead of subservience. The vast majority of schools are not communities. With their ringing bells, assembly lines, grading systems and standardized testing procedures, they’re more like factories than anything else – where those who don’t make the grade are simply thrown to the discard pile and labelled faulty.

School is an alienating environment for a lot of kids. It’s no wonder really, when children feel like they have to beat their own peers in order to survive the academic trials of school life. We’ve created an environment for children in which they distrust one another, withhold information from one another, and wish for their own success at the expense of another’s failure, and then we wonder why kids still bully and antagonize. We’re always quick to blame the kids and reprimand them rather than seeing it as a problem with the way education is fundamentally structured. We can make school a place where children feel loved, respected and valued by everybody, but the only way to do that is through a drastic restructuring of the system itself.