hello,
given the discussion regarding arguments against service-learning, i
thought i'd forward the following article by chester finn. delete this
message if you're not interested. the citation is included (in case you
need the bounded volume version).
best,
bernadette chi
Finn, Chester E., Jr.; Vanourek, Gregg.
> Charity begins at school. (critique of service learning)
> Commentary v100, n4 (Oct, 1995):46 (3 pages).
>
> COPYRIGHT American Jewish Committee 1995
>
> In 1989, with much fanfare, President Bush convened the nation's
>governors in Charlottesville, Virginia for a summit meeting on our
>educational woes. The primary accomplishment of the gathering was
>agreement on six broad goals to be achieved by century's end, goals that
>became the foundation of Bush's America 2000 school-reform strategy and,
>in altered form, of President Clinton's controversial Goals 2000 program.
>
> Tucked away in the sweeping language of the document which emerged
>some months later from the Charlottesville gathering were some highly
>specific objectives, one of which promised that by the year 2000 "[a]ll
>students will be involved in activities that promote and demonstrate good
>citizenship, community service, and personal responsibility." In plain
>words, America's children would be expected to work as volunteers in
>programs organized by their schools.
>
> Though this was the first time that mandatory volunteer work-an
>oxymoron known variously in the field as "experiential education,"
>"character education," "community service," and, most frequently, "service
>learning"--received the federal government's stamp of approval, support
>for it had long been growing among professional educators as a way to tie
>textbook learning to the "real world," while strengthening character by
>imbuing students with the habit of serving others.
>
> The increasing appeal of service learning appears to have arisen from
>the convergence of several familiar streams. Perhaps the oldest of these
>is the belief, stretching back to the Founders, and beyond them to
>Aristotle, that preparing the next generation for citizenship is a vital
>mission of any democratic society and that schools should habituate their
>students to what Benjamin Franklin termed the "publick religion."
>
> This ancient and respectable idea has merged, in modern times, with
>the seemingly ineradicable conviction that the schools have an obligation
>to "build a new social order" (in the words of a once prominent
>"progressive" educator, George S. Counts, writing in 1932). Educators of
>this persuasion place far less emphasis on "academic" knowledge and the
>acquisition of basic skills than on arming the young with "critical
>thinking skills" and affording them opportunities to right society's
>wrongs.
>
> Still a third stream is the by-now well-established American practice
>of channeling idealism via government-sponsored volunteer programs like
>VISTA and the Peace Corps. If volunteering is a good thing, goes the
>reasoning of those who advocate such initiatives, it will be even better
>if government encourages, shapes, and subsidizes it.
>
> WITH each of these strands playing its respective part, Bush was
>hardly making a radical departure in Charlottesville. Already in his 1988
>campaign for the presidency, he had praised Americans who freely gave of
>their time and energy to good causes as "a thousand points of light." Once
>in the White House, he set various governmental bodies in motion to
>promote voluntarism across the land, including in primary and secondary
>schools.
>
> After Bush's defeat in 1992, Clinton picked up where his predecessor
>had left off. He began his tenure in office by speaking eagerly of a
>Citizens Corps, with college-tuition aid offered to those who enlisted. A
>trial project was launched: a federally-funded "summer of service" that
>put some 1,500 young adults to work. By the autumn of 1993 the White House
>duly pronounced the trial a success, and by winter a new government body,
>the Corporation for National and Community Service, was created to extend
>the "summer of service" into a year-'round affair involving not only
>higher education but primary and secondary schools as well. By this time
>the focus had shifted from voluntary to compulsory, and President Clinton
>was declaring: "[I]t is a very good thing for the states or local school
>districts to mandate community service for kids.... I think that every
>state should include community service as part of the curriculum."
>
> And so it has been. Programs mandating volunteer work (some of which
>antedate the federal initiatives, having percolated from the grassroots
>up) are now under way across the land. According to a 1994 survey, 37
>percent of U.S. high schools are either operating or planning programs in
>which students are "required to perform a specific number of hours of
>community service in order to graduate." Another 1994 report shows that 44
>percent of high-school seniors had engaged in community service within the
>previous two years.
>
> Of course, for those committed to the goal that all students be so
>engaged, participation rates of less than half are a poor showing. The
>advocates, accordingly, are redoubling their efforts. One powerful
>instrument at their disposal has been the 1994 reauthorization of the
>Elementary and Secondary Education Act. (The Act allocates the lion's
>share of federal school aid.) This 1,200-page measure contains nearly
>twenty separate programs encouraging or underwriting "service learning."
>With the federal government vigorously pressing ahead, and with only five
>years remaining before Goals 2000's target of universal participation is
>achieved, it seems an appropriate time to pause and ask precisely what is
>going on here.
>
> ONE way to approach this question is to look at Maryland, a state
>that has been in the vanguard of the trend, and that now boasts the only
>statewide service-learning requirement in the nation. In 1985, Maryland's
>board of education mandated that all school systems offer elective courses
>and programs involving volunteer work and community service. Seven years
>later, and over objections by all but two of its 24 county-school systems,
>Maryland made volunteer work a requirement for students before graduation
>from high school. Today, an elaborate service-learning infrastructure is
>in place across the state.
>
> In some Maryland schools it is difficult to distinguish service
>learning from ordinary classroom activity. Local school systems can opt to
>award service-learning credit for certain kinds of class projects. Thus,
>according to a recent state report, students in a seventh-grade language-
>arts class in Carroll County have met their volunteer-work requirement by
>"research[ing] disabilities and chronic illnesses . . . and then
>report[ing] their findings to their classmates." In Prince George's County
>students in English classes have satisfied service-learning requirements
>by "penning letters to sick children or senior citizens in hospitals."
>
> In other locations, the volunteering is somewhat more arduous and
>must be done outside school. Thus, Baltimore students held "a party for
>the senior citizens at a nearby nursing home. They prepared the food, made
>the decorations, organized the entertainment, and conducted the games." In
>Calvert County, students earned credit by recycling paper, cans, and
>plastic. In Frederick County, service-learning students "painted
>'Chesapeake Bay Drainage, on all of the storm drains surrounding Thomas
>Johnson High School" to increase "public awareness of local impact on the
>Bay." Other programs around the state involve fire prevention, food drives
>for the homeless, and cleaning up old cemeteries.
>
> But in some Maryland communities, students have fulfilled their
>service requirements by engaging in activities with a more overtly
>ideological tinge. In Cecil County, for example, they "wrote numerous
>letters to the county commissioners when the county abolished recycling
>due to expense." The students "convincingly persuaded the commissioners to
>continue the project for the environmental benefits, despite the cost to
>the county." in Harford County, students earned credit by "writing
>advocacy letters to affect legislation on a seat-belt law for school
>buses." And in Howard County, eighth graders at Patapsco Middle School
>kept developers from destroying a historic cemetery.
>
> AS THESE examples suggest, much of what passes for service learning
>involves political activism. But that should hardly be surprising,
>because, in the eyes of its advocates, such activism--always, in practice,
>on the liberal-to-Left end of the political spectrum--is service
>learning's most desirable form.
>
> The organization that administers Maryland's program of volunteer
>activities, the Maryland Student Service Alliance (MSSA), has a poster it
>uses to promote its own good work. This depicts a mountain showing various
>levels of community service. Halfway up the slope are activities like
>ladling hot food in a soup kitchen. At the pinnacle lies the loftiest form
>of voluntarism: lobbying.
>
> MSSA also distributes a service learning handbook. It sets forth a
>"progression" of activities from "personal contact" (such as coaching
>children for the Special Olympics), to "indirect services" (such as
>recruiting others to a cause), and onward to "advocacy," which in turn
>ranges from "writing a letter to the editor, to lobbying for a cause, to
>engaging in a political campaign." When a journalist asked MSSA's current
>director, Maggie O'Neill, whether her program does not cross the line
>between community service and political action, she replied with a
>revealing question of her own: "How would you differentiate between the
>two?"
>
> The desire to entice children into political activism is hardly
>limited to Maryland. In fact, it is amply illustrated in prominent
>guidebooks for educators in the burgeoning learning-by-volunteering field.
>The premier such text is Civitas (1991), a "framework for civic education"
>produced by the California-based Center for Civic Education. According to
>its authors, voluntarism will not fulfill its educational promise if
>students work in private agencies, because these provide "little sense of
> . . public policy, or the power relationships of the modern service
>world." For Civitas, volunteer work should be seen less as an opportunity
>to expose students to homeless shelters and hospitals than as an
>opportunity to enhance "student competence to monitor and influence public
>policy in diverse arenas."
>
> Another influential manual in the service-learning field is Ralph
>Nader's Civics for Democracy (1992), published by the Center for Study of
>Responsive Law. Among its 75 "student-activity ideas" are: "investigate
>hospitals, Boards of Trustees to determine adequacy of consumer/patient/
>employee representation"; "survey companies for illegal tax avoidance";
>"evaluate toxic and hazardous materials used in school chemistry labs";
>and "test [repair shops,] honesty and competence. Follow up with programs
>to license repair shops or pressure businesses."
>
> This course of study has been greeted enthusiastically in some
>quarters. Eleanor Smeal, former president of the National Organization for
>Women, has hailed Civics for Democracy as "a textbook that empowers
>students to become activists and leaders." The writer Studs Terkel
>predicts that its use will build "far more hip and active citizens." Jesse
>Jackson has praised the book for recognizing that "people learn in
>different ways." Some, he continues, "think them selves into a way of
>acting while others act themselves into a way of thinking. Civics for
>Democracy allows students to do both."
>
> EVEN if school-based volunteer programs steered completely clear of
>lobbying and politics, which most of them do not, their compulsory nature
>raises another set of questions. Having an agency of government decide
>what does and does not qualify as volunteer work is a recipe for conflict;
>already dissenters have been punished, and court challenges are in the
>works.
>
> A fourteen-year-old Boy Scout in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was
>told, for example, that his volunteer work for a local thrift shop and
>nature trail did not qualify for service-learning credit because the merit
>badges he earned meant he had received "compensation," and was therefore
>not a genuine volunteer. At Liberty High School in Bethlehem,
>Pennsylvania, another student--a Girl Scout volunteering on her own in a
>nursing home and for Meals on Wheels--forfeited her diploma when she
>refused to perform 60 hours of school-directed community service.
>
> At Rye Neck High School in Mamaroneck, New York, a student who is a
>Jehovah's Witness had his proposed project rejected on the grounds that it
>violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Another Rye Neck
>student took the school to court, claiming that his paid work as a
>lifeguard helped his family cover its living expenses, and he could not
>spare the time to work as a volunteer. His parents added a philosophical
>objection of their own; as they explained to the Second Circuit Court of
>Appeals,
>
> We have taught our children
> through both word and example
> that to do good for others,
> without being asked or told
> and without compensation, is its
> own reward.... But never have
> we told our children that they
> must, or are obligated to, help
> others. That would defeat all we
> have tried to impart to them
> over the years about serving others
> and consequently destroy
> any moral value in serving others.
>
> As such cases illustrate, mandatory voluntarism runs the risk of
>degrading the virtue of service itself, while politicizing the school
>curriculum and recruiting impressionable youths for causes dear to the
>hearts of graying activists. These issues would be vexing enough if
>individual schools and communities were working them out separately and
>families could choose the versions that suited them best, or simply opt
>out. But responsibility for decisions about student voluntarism is now
>increasingly being shifted from the local to the state and federal level,
>where, as we have seen, it is eagerly embraced.
>
> In the educational bureaucracies of Washington, officials are now
>crafting rules for programs, conditions for grants, and measures by which
>progress toward national goals and objectives will be gauged. Though
>defenders of these efforts assert that compliance with federal efforts is
>optional, and that states and communities remain free to chart their own
>course, decades of experience show that once a federal educational
>initiative is launched, everything that subsequently happens in states and
>localities is drawn into its powerful wake.
>
> If this pattern holds true for service learning, students and schools
>will likely find themselves caught in a pincer, consisting on one side of
>federal financial support and on the other of national curriculum
>standards and annual reports of progress toward national educational
>goals. Anyone acquainted with, for example, the past quarter-century of
>federal bilingual or "special-education" programs knows just how strong
>Washington's grip can be. No one associated with these programs can
>introduce a change or take a step without colliding with a voluminous
>array of federal regulations, all of them suspended by funding strings.
>This fate is now befalling service learning, and it will potentially
>affect all 50 million schoolchildren in the United States.
>
> THE lessons our children are likely to learn from being compelled to
>"volunteer" are worth worrying about, but children are not the only cause
>for concern. Offering service to others, with no government coercion or
>expectation of compensation, is a deeply rooted American tradition. By far
>the largest beneficiaries of philanthropic and volunteer impulses are
>churches, which absorb 62 percent of charitable contributions and the
>uncompensated services of 52 million people. One wonders how much of the
>character-shaping benefits of voluntarism in church and community will
>survive the combination of compulsion and dilution that school-based
>service learning entails. Are not young people likely to begin to view
>voluntarism as they do a required lab report, history paper, or laps
>around the track? Can our highly developed tradition of church-based
>service even coexist at all with mandatory, government-based programs, or
>will the former atrophy and die while the latter proliferate and thrive?
>
> Most troubling of all, however, is that our schools, which are
>performing so poorly in their core mission of transmitting basic skills
>and essential knowledge, are now diverting time, energy, and money to
>nonacademic matters. In Maryland, where service learning has made so much
>headway, only 22 percent of fourth graders were "proficient" readers on
>the latest national assessment and, on the state's own tests, fewer than
>half of the eighth graders performed satisfactorily in math. Schools that
>can barely teach the fundamental skills and information needed by every
>citizen are now being used by government and adult activists to shape
>students, attitudes and assumptions about citizenship itself. This is
>arguably the last thing that should be tampered with by a government that
>is supposed to be the creation of its citizens, not the other way around.
>
> CHESTER E. FINN, JR. is the John M. Olin fellow at the Hudson
>Institute in Washington, D. C. GREGG VANOUREK is a researcher at Hudson.
>
>
*******************************
Bernadette Chi, Graduate Student
Policy, Organizations, Measurement and Evaluation
National Center for Research in Vocational Education
Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley
"Movement is what creates life. Stillness is what creates love. To be
still and still moving--this is everything." -- Do Hyun Choe