By Madelyn Holm

In the United States, public education has stood physically and philosophically apart from the community and society in which it serves. Maintaining a divide between schools and communities is undesirable and ineffective. Schools become institutions where students are given information and challenged to relate material back to their lives outside of school. John Dewey wrote that schooling, with no connection to the community beyond the school, is irrelevant to the life of the individual child: “From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school”.

In this way, home, school, and community are separate parts that seldom overlap or relate to one another. Students’ lives stand disconnected from the current historical circumstances, but are still influenced by social, political, and economic situations. These influences should be factored into what is taught. In the status quo, students are expected to utilize the information they learn in schools; while they are given little too no opportunities to engage with school-based material independent of the school.

Mary Swierk, author of A Guide to Service Learning, expressed frustration that schools are so focused on advanced studies that there is not enough time spent applying learning to practical situations. This restricts on educators’ capacities to change the curriculum for the benefit of the students, and due to the demand for student preparedness in the high stakes testing mandated at the federal level, there is little room for change. To the “dismay of students, parents and teachers alike, standardized tests have abolished the classes that are associated with the development of culture”, included in cultural development are ties to the community.

Further, standardized tests and curricular pressures have created a culture of disengaged students. Disengaged in this context refers to students who are apathetic, disinterested, or lacking motivation to connect with the material. By high school, as many as “40 to 60% of all students—urban, suburban, and rural—are chronically disengaged from school” and “65% say they are unexcited about their classes.” Students who are chronically disengaged are at a higher risk of dropping out of school. Annually, 1 in 4 high school students in the United States drop out of school predominantly because of disengagement.

The more schools focus their attention on raising test scores or creating curriculum for the sole purpose of generating funding, students will continue to suffer from an education system that divides students lives into disconnected segments. To make schools more relevant to the student Dewey wrote:

“[T]he school must represent present life—life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground, that education which does not occur through forms of life, forms that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality, and tends to cramp and to deaden.”

If schools are outside the social and community life of a child, then there is a need for a stronger “connection between doing and knowing;” currently there is a disconnect between the two. If education is separate from the lives of the students, then it is fundamentally important to provide students with ways to use additional and complementary education opportunities to apply learning back to their lives.

The goal should then become one of bringing communities into schools in an effort to enhance the curriculum and the learning of students. In such a scenario, teachers would have the responsibility of connecting “subject matter with the places where students live and the issues that affect us all.” By creating dynamic curricula featuring community-based learning, teachers would begin to address issues of disengagement. In isolated cases, schools and educators have done just that: attempted to bridge the gap between the school and community through the use of direct contact between students and community organizations and projects.

In a study conducted on the use of integrated community-based learning, research evidence supported the assertion that “if all students are to succeed, we must pay much more attention to community-based learning as a strategy for engaging and motivating students and for strengthening the relationship between schools and communities.” Private schools, charters, and increasingly, public schools, have used a variety of ways to engage with communities in order to expand the meaning of “the classroom.”  In creating classrooms that go beyond the walls of the school, students are given more opportunities to integrate their learning with the local community.

At an institutional level how can teachers, staff, and President Cantor continue to support the needs of students, while adding to the value of student education? Departments at SMCC have tried a variety of ways of reengaging students in their learning. Two successful tactics professors have used are implementing mandatory service learning requirements, and creating cohorts of students for them to rely on whether in FIGS or within departments like Nursing, Plumbing, Fire Science, or Construction Technology. Mandating students participate in student centered learning is controversial, but the results are clear: when students are engaged at an institutional and community level they are more successful. Lets continue to create a culture of successful students by supporting them in any and all ways.