John Dewey, Education, Schools

"We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character building involved in this kind of life: training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world. There was always something which really needed to be done, and a real necessity that each member of the household should do his own part faithfully and in co-operation with others." John Dewey

Basically schooling must begin in the home because of the amount that a child needs to know before they begin their formal education in the school system. Many families do nothing to help their children get started thus making it harder for the student's first teacher. For example a student does not know how to count. As a teacher you must make sure that the student has the ability to develop their pre-counting skills quickly enough not to hinder the other children in the class. Or another example the student does not know their alphabet you must work with the student and see if he can learn his alphabet quickly enough not to hinder the others in the class because you cannot stop just for one child all of the time unless they have a question. Something that can be done to help assist the children like the student mentioned above is to help them during recess or talk to their parents and see if after school tutoring could be an option to assist the child and get them to the level they need to be.

John Dewey believed that the school and community should work together hand in hand to teach the children in various ways. For example: Community Service, Guest Speakers,
School Funding, and Field Trips.

The Community Service aspect can be used with all of the class's lesson plans for example students from an older class could go read to some of the younger students once a week or a different child each day could go read a story to one of the younger classes once a month to help improve their reading skills. Or students could go to the nursing home once a month for a couple hours and listen to stories from some of the residents about their life for example war veterans, people who lived through the Holocaust, or Great Depression.
Guest Speakers are something that was often brought in during my school days in Middle School at least once a month we had a guest speaker come talk to us about something that the principal of the school thought would interest us. Many times we did not pay attention for more than a few minutes so we ended up sitting there doing our homework. One time they actually brought in somebody who was planning on doing a fundraiser with us to help raise money to help keep art and band in the curriculum by offering us amazing prizes for the school if the school as a whole sold so many items or a certain amount of money in sells. But many time the guest speakers would talk to us about historical facts or problems arising within America that will affect us all. Those speakers often didn't get very much attention from my class because the majority of my class had ADD or something of the like because we would be staring at the ceiling most of the time and counting the number of rafters that was holding up our gym roof and trying to decide what it would take to rip the roof off of the building to cancel school for more than a day or two other than snow.
School funding was always something that my county had each school do for various reasons, for example in high school all of the clubs and booster programs had the students involved with the activity sell something, band we sold cookie dough, softball we sold hoodies, pants, shorts, and stuff like that with the school logo and name on it, the football team got ticket sells while the band boosters ran the concession stand. Hi-Y often received donations from local businesses from where we went to help them out with some type of problem they had ie wrecked garden, hosting a blood drive operated by students (they did not take blood or anything like that they talked to the people getting their blood taken, got them food and drinks, signed them in etc), Envirothon we had to find donations of local businesses in order to go compete at the state level where we came in 18th out of the whole state my junior year of high school. In elementary and middle school they just did general fund raisers like selling magazine subscriptions and Christmas items from a catalog for a couple weeks and the more we sold the more stuff we won. I think the most I ever sold in any of those was around $75 which hardly got me any type of prize while there were other kids who had rich relatives who bought everything in the catalog just so the kid could get every prize they had to offer.
Field trips can be really important if they are actually educational. I think my entire time as a student the most educational field trip that they had was when they took the fourth graders to the state capitol and the state museum. We had guided tours of both because the county school system paid for us to go and it was a state requirement for every student in the state to go visit the capitol and museum and learn about the state history. I knew most of the things they were telling us because I lived in WV my entire life and had been there several times before so it really did not benefit me at all. There was one field trip I was not allowed to go on (mom wouldn't allow me to go), and that was when the school took the 5th graders to the high security prison that is about a hour away. They took the kids from my grade because we were the trouble makers all through school it actually changed several of the kids in my class because they saw where they could possibly be within a few years and it scared them. There were only about 30 kids out of my whole grade that actually went because their parents allowed them to go. After that year they didn't take them back down there because of the few numbers of parents who would actually allow their child to go.

Schools must have community within them or else there will be massive problems within the system. For example if the teachers do not talk to one another then they will have problems with what they are teaching because each grade builds upon the previous one. Also the teachers should talk to one another to get ideas on how to teach certain subjects to help students remember the information better. Also the students must see school as a community that they are apart of because they have to learn to work within a community as both a child and an adult. It is best for children to learn these skills at an early age to help communicate different things to different people because the children are working one the same things for a common goal among themselves for them it is promotion to the next grade.