Importance Of Community In Learning

7.0 Importance to involve the community in learning.

“It takes a village to raise a child”, this mean that the whole community has an essential role to play in the growth and development of the young people. Parents and family member have vital role to play in the child’s education, moreover the community hold the greatest responsibility to assure high-quality education for all students.

Although learning involves individual behavioural changes, the context in which those changes occur is a social environment involving many people. The community in learning form part in the Hidden Curriculum. In the traditional society, parent involvement was characterized as volunteers, mostly mother’s assisting in classroom, escorting students and fundraising.

When schools, parent, families and communities work together to support learning, students tend to earn higher grades, attend school more regularly, stay in school longer and enrol in other learning program establish by the school. Regardless of the parent’s education and family income, it has been found that parent involvement affects minority student’s academic achievement across all races.

However, community involvement can be interpreted differently by different people. It involves parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making and collaboration with community. Community activities engage parents and family to meet the needs of the students whether in learning or social development. It is important to involve the community in learning since it play important role in student’s safety, perception of safety at school and its attendant impact on student’s

In almost every school there is the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). Every year, schools organize a PTA meeting to discuss matters on the educational, moral and well being of the pupils. Every child begins life within a particular family. The child is raised and taught some fundamental principles in life, such as what is right and what is wrong, the kind of behavior approves of and that society regards as anti-social. Thus children begin life in a home environment learning and being exposed of life principles. Gradually, as the child grows older it becomes an imperative for the child to meet persons in a different environment where formal education takes place. The discipline and learning which was initially and exclusively the responsibility of the parents, must now be shared between parents and teachers.

Teachers become the watch dogs and the regulators of the new way of life, helping the child to adapt to everything seemingly new for the child. But because the parents still play an important role in the life of the child, it becomes necessary and important to group the two main actors at this stage of the student’s life to work together in raising a complete human person. Therefore the idea of a Parent- Teacher Association came to be borne out of the necessity to avoid conflicting methods and approaches in raising the