Working Towards a Model of Secondary School Culture

Contemporary secondary schools in Canada and the United States are complex institutions whose organizational structures, program delivery mechanisms, and institutional community members combine to produce distinctive mini-societies within their walls. Replete with complex arrays of rituals, ceremonies, as well as traditions and founded on a variety of basic assumptions, these unique cultural entities have a profound effect on the individuals, and groups who inhabit them. Indeed failure on the part of individual inhabitants to comprehend and accommodate the cultural nuances of the organizations they dwell in has the potential to significantly diminish their prospects for success in those domains. Furthermore, many of the structures and rituals of secondary school life have developed into something akin to cultural icons that have proven to be remarkably resistant to change. This article, therefore, proposes a model of secondary school culture that is intended to serve as a potential starting point for the further examination of these complex institutions.