Culture
The school caters for students who may be experiencing problems due to physical, psychological, emotional and/or familial reasons. They may also have learning difficulties and/or disorders. Their placement at Berne could be short term, where the aim is to work on the student’s behavioural or emotional issues in order to reintegrate them back into their mainstream school, or long term, where the aim is to continue to educate them through to the School Certificate.
The school’s culture has been designed to defuse a lot of the behavioural triggers the students were experiencing in mainstream schools. For example, there is no uniform and there is no set homework.
The student-teacher relationship is unusual compared to mainstream schools. Students address staff by their first name, and even eat meals together. All staff are expected to get involved in all school activities, such as camps, excursions and personal development activities.
There is a strong focus on reducing the derailing effects of learning difficulties and disorders by having small class sizes (of about five or six students per class), and by streaming students based on ability. The lower ability classes are purposefully even smaller, usually having only two or three students per teacher.
Read more about this topic: The John Berne School
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The white dominant culture seemed to think that once the Indians were off the reservations, they’d eventually become like everybody else. But they aren’t like everybody else. When the Indianness is drummed out of them, they are turned into hopeless drunks on skid row.”
—Elizabeth Morris (b. c. 1933)
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)