Bwema Seed Secondary School Parents at one of the new blocks after attending an emergency meeting on May 7, 2025. PHOTO/ DANIEL M SSENFUMA
The modern approach to school-community relations is to regard the school as the ‘capital’ of the community.
With lots of money invested in buildings and equipment, it’s not enough to restrict its use to a few hours each day, five days a week, for only a few months in the year. It’s indeed unjust to keep the buildings open for only 1,000 hours a year.
Most of the schools across the country have been built, equipped, maintained and financed by the public. Admissions are open to all, regardless of political affiliation hence all schools should be able to meet on an equal footing.
Failure to use the school buildings as social centres is poor economics as well as bad education philosophy.
The idea of making a community the best of the school and the school the best of the community represents a fruitful and essential extension of accepted educational thinking and practice. If you want to nourish and promote democracy, community study and service through schools, education must be made essential.
This movement is the most significant single development of its kind in our generation and it seems destined to grow greatly with sound experimentation at all school levels, in all teaching fields, with all types of students, and in all community areas, local, regional, national and international.
Plan the programme of the school with reference to the needs of its community and children.
The basic responsibility of any school is to fold; partly to the society that supports it, a society whose needs and demands reflect basic ideals, past experiences, and immediate and prospective circumstances, and partly to the children and young people it serves.
This may sound practically impossible in Uganda since the curriculum of education in primary and secondary schools is prescribed by one of the state departments of education (NCDC) and schools can not attempt beyond the rigid limits.
Considering the current new education curriculum in Uganda, the courses of study of a vocational subject should suit its peculiar geographical setting.
Community resources can go a long way in vitalising classroom instructions.
The teachers can transform academic symbols into realities, by connecting them with the conditions in the communities about which the child is gaining first-hand knowledge from day- to-day.
It would be tragic if a child can point to a river in his or her geography text book but does not know that the same stream flowing through his village is also the river described in their geography book.
Similarly, a child has read a whole lesson on cotton and its various uses. They are then asked to state where cotton comes from.
Is it not deplorable if the same student replies that cotton comes from the backs of some animals such as sheep? It’s the duty of the teacher to make his learning as realistic as possible.
The teacher must make it clear, for example, that geography is nothing but a systematic account of the facts and phenomenon of animal, plant and human life. That composition in one of the ways of communicating experiences, ideas and teachings.
This method of presentation will preserve the unit and continuity of a child's experience and bring about an interplay of influence between the school and the outside world.
The students will become automatically interested, more spontaneous out of the school. They will benefit by the redefining and enlarging influence of the school ideas which will be carried over from the classroom.
Field trips, community surveys and school camps should be organised for the purpose.
Field trips may be undertaken for securing information, changing attitudes, awakening interest, developing appreciation, promoting ideas, enjoying new experiences.
They may be used to initiate a unit of study or serve as its core or give it the finishing touch. They impact first hand knowledge, confirm and supplement second hand knowledge, they sharpen observation and evaluate principles.
Sharing in community improvement programmes can prove useful for the school children and the community.
Involving individual activities of an integrated mental, physical, emotional, spiritual nature, service projects, are of genuine educational value to the children and of significant social value to the society.
If there is a regular and intelligent scheme of social service by students at public functions and the school can in any way assure the community of the spontaneous help in adverse times, the school will automatically attract notice and sympathy.
Some other projects are educational weeks, clean up weeks, and youth weeks, projects in public safety, civic beauty, health, agricultural and industrial improvement, local history, protection of resources.
Teachers with fore sight and patience can exploit projects for providing functional realistic and democratic education.
The school can serve as the centre of adult activities.
The school can be made the centre of social education and public notice boards may be set up to display news and other useful information about the local community in particular and the country in general and the whole world.
The school furniture rooms, play grounds, halls may be freely lent out to the adult community for purposes of education and recreation.
Several adults’ organisations such as cooperative societies among others may be allowed to hold their committee meetings in the school classrooms. They may be invited to use the school halls for lectures, radio talk shows, and such religious disclosures.
The teachers should be available for talks and discussions on several aspects of life.
Schools can arrange various programmes i.e. musical, dramatic and cultural and those relating to national and international affairs and members of the community may be invited to attend and participate in them. Schools should not only be a mirror of the society but also its critics.
It should therefore, launch campaigns against social evils such as drinking, gambling, borrowing etc. The idea of making the community the best of the school and the school the best of the community represents a fruitful and essential extension of accepted educational thinking and practice.
If it wants to foster democracy, community study and service through the school must be enforced. The school must be made the social, intellectual and cultural nerve centre of the community. It must become the educational dispensary of its community. School community relations will have to be made practical.
