Cultural Toxicity in a Public School Setting and the Means to Deal With It

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Being a student is an extremely challenging task. Not only does a student have to acquire new knowledge and skills, but also to learn more about social skills and the art of communication. However, students face a number of obstacles in their attempts to integrate into the school society, cultural toxicity being the key one. Over the past few years, the phenomenon of cultural toxicity has been researched to improve the relations between teachers and students, as well as find motivations for students to maintain good scores and be invested into the learning process.

Defined as the “negative places where the rituals, traditions, and values have gone sour and threaten the very soul of a school” (Deal & Peterson, 2010, p. viii), cultural toxicity is a clear sign of the fact that a school lacks strong leadership and that the students in school experience the influence of a subculture (Kouzes & Posner, 2007), which appears to be stronger than the cultural and moral values promoted by the school staff.

In a nutshell, cultural toxicity occurs when a school lacks efficient leadership and when, not motivated in studying, students find the cultural vault that allows them both to express themselves and to integrate into the existing mini-society of their peers successfully. That being said, it would be naïve to assume that cultural toxicity is a recent phenomenon that has never occurred before. Quite on the contrary, the phenomenon of cultural toxicity is recurrent and, therefore, rather well known.

The process of cultural toxicity can be saboteured quite easily, though, once the elements of successful leadership strategy are introduced (Bell & Smith, 2010). There is no secret that the students who get involved into school subcultures are highly susceptible to the influence of the current trends; that being said, the given feature of teenagers’ character can be used to address the problem of cultural toxicity by introducing a strong leader who can also be looked up to as the role model for the students.

It could be argued that the suggested strategy has to be very subtle to have a tangible effect on the students and, therefore, is extremely hard to pull off. However, what most of the opponents miss is the fact that, for students to choose a specific code of conduct to follow, they have to be motivated by a powerful factor. In case of cultural toxicity, the far factor is by far the most influential one, seeing how it makes students dread the very concept of not being accepted into the subculture of their mini-society and, therefore, be ostracized by the members of the latter.

Thus, an even more powerful enhancement of behavioral change must be introduced so that the students could be subverted into a more acceptable behavior pattern should be introduced, which becomes possible when several leadership strategies are combined. To start with, it is important to develop a cohesive charismatic strategy that will help set the example for the rest of the students to follow (Bates & Sangra, 2011). Second, the transformational strategy, which is aimed at shaping the students’ attitude towards school and the acceptable behavior must be provided (Reeves, 2008). By using the combination of the given strategies, one can be relatively certain that most students will be willing to join the school mini-society and refuse from creating or becoming a member of other mini-societies.

It should also be mentioned, though, that specific members of toxic culture have to be dealt with individually. For example, it is crucial to make sure that such members of the toxic culture as pessimistic storyteller and the keeper of the nightmare should be transformed into ordinary members of a school mini-society as soon as possible. As authoritative sources claim, there are several ways to handle the aforementioned characters.

Speaking of the former, who can be defined as the person who is constantly reminding the rest of the class about the failures that occurred in the past, the approach known as the transformation of the past events and reconsideration of the positive contributions that were made in the course of the past endeavors and the possible improvements that can be made to these endeavor to adapt them to the present-day situation. The given approach is also applicable when facing the criticism of the keepers of the nightmare, who are known to upset new ideas by claiming that they have already been used in the past.

Although school environment is extremely hard to control, with the help of positive attitude, a number of changes can be made. School is not simply a place where students acquire necessary skills and knowledge – it is a complex system with a number of functions, one of which is to help students understand how adult society works. Therefore, it is necessary to keep an eye on the tendencies among students to isolate themselves from the adult world by creating their own mini-societies and cultures. Not only does the toxic culture gives a false notion of how the adult world works, but also prevents students from learning efficiently. Thus, it is crucial that the students should be offered an alternative behavioral pattern to accept, which the combination of the leadership styles mentioned above will help provide.

Reference List

Bates, A. W. T., & Sangra, A. (2011). Managing technology in higher education: Strategies for transforming teaching and learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Bell, A. H., & Smith, D. M. (2010). Developing leadership abilities (2^nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Deal, T. E., & Peterson, K. D. (2010). Shaping school culture: Pitfalls, paradoxes and promises. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. S. (2007). The leadership challenge (4th ed.). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Reeves, D. B. (2008). Reframing teacher leadership to improve your school. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

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Cultural Toxicity in a Public School Setting and the Means to Deal With It

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