In The Service of What? The Politics of Service Learning

Ok... So, the main point that Kahne and Westheimer are making here is that as a society we're encouraging students to become involved with service learning, but we really don't have a clear goal on what kind of service learning we want to have students do.

As they explained, there are two different types of service learning. Charity and Change. I already knew this and have had to do a ton of service learning for different things. Some for school, some for church, and some for scholarships. I know the ropes.

And I like service learning. I really always have. For the most part my service learning has been in the hopes to change things, but I have also done something things that would be considered charity. I think that we need both of them.

All this seems so obvious to me that it's painful to write about now. I don't know why I'm having such a strong opposing attitude towards responding to this article. I guess I've just talked about it so many times before that it feels like someone giving me an assignment about healthy foods versus unhealthy foods. Just obvious things that feel silly to keep repeating because I know them all already.

Hey, I just thought of something though. Maybe an interesting analogy? I don't know, worth mentioning though.


Charity is sort of like junk food. It tastes good going down, you feel good for that minute or hour or day. But then you forget that you even ate that piece of cake or that bag of chips and you don't care about the last time that you did.



Change is like healthy food. It can be hard work to keep up with that good diet, but it's a long term good feeling. It's more work having to prepare a salad to bring for lunch than it is to grab a cheeseburger out of Donovan, but in 5 years, you're going to have made a difference (at least for your body).

Hmm, I think I like that analogy. Maybe it's flawed because the people you're serving aren't represented, but that's ok. Service learning isn't always about helping people anyways.


So we'll call Charity junk food, and we'll call change healthy food. We all need to grab junk food every now and then. Why? Well, because sometimes we really do just need a break from cutting up all those carrots for our salad. And other times we just need a quick fix of "Feel Good".

So we donate a dollar to a charity, or we go to volunteer at a soup kitchen for a night. We do this because we might not have time to do something that is going to change anything and we just want a quick fix of "I did something good today. Yay for me, I'm a good person".

Healthy food, a good diet, is doing something that's going to have a long term effect on the people (or things) you're helping.

Let's do a hypothetical situation. So, you help out at a school and teach kids how to plant trees and flowers and about the importance of preserving our environment. You do this for three years. In those three years you teach 300 students how to plant.

Then 100 of those students go on to plant trees and flowers in their community and inspire other people to help. They then teach those people how to plant trees and flowers and about preserving nature. Five years after you started teaching kids how to plant there are now 10 new gardens in your students communities and 70 trees planted.

If the cycle continues, that's change. It took three years of your life to get this movement started, but you managed to get other people motivated and now everyone's planting stuff all over the place and everything's looking beautiful. It's harder than just donating a buck to public parks, but it changed something.

"As Lawrence Cremin explains. these educators believed that. "by manipulating the school curriculum, they could ultimately change the world."

Change is also educational. Instead of just tossing a dollar in a jar that says "Help us plant trees! Donate today!" you're learning why we need to plant tress. What the benefits of gardens are in your community.

If school want students to do service learning, I think it should be because it's an education experience. Therefor, I think that service learning required for school should be focused on change.

Students have more free times than most adults do. They have opened minds, more so than many adults, and have energy. They can inspire other young people to help. They also have 13 years where they're stuck in school anyways, so why not have them spend the last 4 of those years working on changing something important?

"Students tutor. coach softball, paint playgrounds, and read to the elderly because they are interested in people, or because they want to learn a little about poverty and racism before they head out into the waiting corporate world .... We do not volunteer "to make a statement," or to use the people we work with to protest something." -William T. Grant

I think that statement is true to an extent. I do believe that some people do community service just because they want to present an image for themselves. I think it would be better to encourage change service learning rather than charity service learning because it makes the volunteer involved enough to give them a change to REALLY care. Charity seems to be easy for people to do quickly and without much passion, especially if it's required.

"If we focus on the "numerous values we share as a community," writes Amitai Etzioni, the founder of the cornmunitarian movement and a proponent of service learning, "our world would be radically improved. "32 While such rhetoric might allow this political scientist to be a trusted advisor to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, it will not resolve the dilemmas facing practitioners who need to think carefully about the many values that we do not share, about what a radically improved world might look like, and about the different ways one might pursue this goal."

I think this is a big issue when it comes to getting political support for volunteer work that promotes change! Some people are just not ready for these changes to happen. They're comfortable with certain people being oppressed, or certain life styles being better than others. Something like my planting trees example isn't a threat to the way that we live as people, but, something like promoting the hiring of women in high position jobs (both in business and politics) would add more competition for men who want those positions.