Awareness and values for a sustainable school culture

Abstract

This article describes how a sustainable working environment for both students and teachers could be formed. Grading implies evaluation, and furthermore does a high workload and a continuous loss of acquired knowledge raise doubts of meaningfulness of existent education systems. Multiple skills that are demanded from teachers include social interaction, inclusion of weaker students, conveying fundamental competencies and supporting students in finding their own identity. While requesting virtues like determination, diligence and willingness to learn, students are rather striving for certainty, appreciation, self-realization and personal fulfilment (Shell Jugendstudie, 2010). These various claims can be overstraining to students and evoke a stressful learning environment in school. This is also supported by high burn out rates among teachers. The thesis proposed here is not to shield students by e.g. let them repeat the same class but to strengthen so called transrational values and skills that would be useful for developing proactive resources and vitality. By using these important competences of wisdom, polarity of success and failure can be overcome. At this point, school can serve as a setting of creating awareness and health.