School Culture as an Object of Research

Though it is laborious to examine the culture of the school, researchers have been endeavouring to empirically apprehend it since the 1960’s. A variety of research jobs have been carried out, of various starting points, ways of materialisation, and conclusions. The present text indicates a way of classifying these studies according to the purposes they had been assigned. Though the list of examples is not entirely complete nor is the classification definite, a conclusion is clear and evident: in most cases, the culture of the school is not examined in order to grasp this culture itself. Much more often, the culture of the school is examined as a starting point, a pre-condition, or a tool to explore another object of the researcher’s interest outside the culture itself, such as the quality and evaluation of the school’s overall performance, the quality of the learning process, or the school’s developmental potential.