Schools teach life skills that make it easier to navigate the challenges that life throws at you. It helps you develop critical thinking and decision making abilities.
Students spend hundreds of hours around people their age which teaches them how to communicate and be a part of society. Education is essential to the future of our society.
Education
The purpose of education in schools is to teach children a range of important life lessons. These include critical thinking, honesty, and humanitarianism. They are invaluable lessons that students will take with them throughout their lives.
Schools also provide a social environment where students learn to work with each other. They spend a lot of time together, and they must work on assignments and projects. This helps them develop essential social skills, and it prepares them for the adult world.
Despite the importance of education, many schools around the world are struggling to meet their goals. Poor infrastructure, lack of resources and a shortage of teachers are impeding student success. These barriers are often compounded by economic and social factors, such as poverty.
School-based interventions can have a significant impact on student outcomes, particularly for children living in poverty. Poverty proofing, for example, is a program that has been shown to improve student outcomes by addressing the barriers that schools face when serving low-income students.
Socialization
A student’s socialization at school is much different from the primary socialization that occurs in family environments. Teachers influence the socialization of students in many ways, including delivering curriculum and teaching morals or “character education” (see Figure 6.1). Students must learn to adapt to features of the school setting that differ from their family environment, such as expected behaviours and structural aspects like peer groups, dress codes, and school-wide rules, such as zero tolerance policies. Students also learn their gender in the classroom, particularly if activities and behaviours are “gendered” by the teacher.
A major factor of socialization at school is the student’s peer group. This is typically the child’s classmates in younger years, and becomes more specific adolescent subgroups in the teen years. Peer group dynamics often involve the promotion of positive values like tolerance, understanding, equality, partnership and cooperation. This is referred to as the hidden, or implicit curriculum. The school culture also encourages the adoption of these values.
Community
Community involvement in education has been shown to enhance student outcomes and strengthen the bond between schools and society. Schools can cultivate family engagement and collaborative leadership through a careful planning process that includes students, families, teachers and school staff.
For example, one school infused classroom instruction with real-world community issues, including immigration policy and the youth mental health crisis, to improve learning and support community needs. Another school provided a food pantry and full medical clinic. These services reduced teacher turnover and improved learning for students.
School leaders must ensure that the voices of marginalized members of their community are heard. This requires a deep understanding of how power works in communities and an ability to interrogate one’s own privilege. It also means communicating with the community in ways they understand, using plain language and avoiding jargon. This can be achieved by knocking on doors, organising school open days and other techniques that allow for meaningful interaction with the community.
Safety
Schools are often thought of as safe places for students. However, many of today’s schools were designed during a time when school safety was not always a top priority.
Creating a safe environment requires more than metal detectors and security cameras. It also involves educating the whole community on what to do in an emergency, such as making sure that everyone knows where to go for help during a lockdown drill or how to respond to a fire.
Build a relationship with local law enforcement and encourage them to be involved in your school. They can talk to the students about being safe, and you might be able to get them to chaperone school events.
In addition, schools need to regularly monitor and evaluate their safety measures to ensure that they are effective. This can include reviewing disciplinary data to ensure that school safety measures do not lead to disparities in discipline outcomes, especially for Black and students with disabilities.