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May 7, 2004

What is "Service Learning," and why should you be concerned about it?

The following article is a critical review of service learning, a curriculum program and teaching methodology that is being aggressively promoted and instituted throughout the schools in our country. The article was written in response to a draft policy brief on service learning from The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) (See the policy brief.)

AYPF is taking a lead role in instituting service learning in American education.

Service-Learning and Citizenship: This area focuses on policies, methodology and programs that feature service-learning, and national and community service. Service-learning is a teaching methodology used in schools, juvenile justice programs like Youth Court, and community-based organizations to apply academic skills to solving real world problems. Service-learning is used in Learn and Serve America and can incorporate project-based learning, applied learning, contextual-based learning, and frequently involves civic engagement, character education, and tutor/mentoring. Individuals involved in national and community service volunteer their time to assist schools and communities. Programs include VISTA, AmeriCorps, Freedom Corps, Senior Corps, City Year, America's Promise, and many others.

Information in this section encompasses programs and strategies used in both formal and informal settings and lists related forum briefs, field trip/discussion group summaries and publications.

AYPF also believes that the article's negative portrayal of the AYPF and its service learning initiatives are biased and unfair, since the proposal is likely to change.

However, the AYPF draft was based on a series of three discussions held in Washington in early 2004. Summaries of those presentations may be found on their website. These presentations and other material published by the AYPF raise similar concerns.

We believe that the service learning critique below raises valid and urgent questions about the role of service learning in transforming education in this country. That transformation reinvents the mission of education from teaching academic, knowledge- based learning to molding the worldview of the next generation. (See Transformational Education)

This critique also raises valid issues about the AYPF, a wealthy non-governmental organization (NGO) funded by a host of corporate foundations that are financially driving a radical transformation of our schools. (See AYPF funders.)

The influential (ostensively mainstream) American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF), recently disseminated a policy paper draft {"To Make Citizens - Seven Propositions toward a Course Correction in Education"} "informed by [a] series of three Capitol Hill Forums," one of which this writer attended. The paper champions universal institution of "Service Learning" programs (already mandatory for high school graduation in several states, and, according the the Department of Education, participated in by a staggering one-third of all K-12 students nationwide).

Service Learning (SL) generally entails social activist projects in which students supposedly learn outside the classroom (a concept SL credits - proudly - to John Dewey, long the object of wide ranging criticism vis a vis his alleged influence on the progressive "dumbing down" of American education throughout the 20th century). Participants, under the guidance of ambitious teachers, have engaged in numerous political activities, including protests.

According to this document:

"Civic education-including character education and service-learning-is necessary to the survival of our democracy"

"The overriding question driving education reform must be: “What kind of child (person, human being) do we want to produce?"

"The national education policy preoccupation with reading, mathematics, and science as the “core disciplines” of public education is myopic and lop-sided." (sic)

Programs must be:

"committed to experiential learning,"

"student-focused, democratic ... and unaffected by partisan politics,"

"outcomes-based, with outcomes being measured by behavioral change in students,"

and:

"infused throughout the whole curriculum ...[and taught via]... interdisciplinary [instruction] ... and ... contextual learning"

Comments:

American civic education curricula are currently under the official auspices of the non-governmental Center for Civic Education (CCE, given such authority under the No Child Left Behind Act {NCLB}). CCE-produced texts and materials jettison American philosophical pillars like natural law, unalienable rights, and national sovereignty, ignore the Constitution's 2nd, 9th, and 10th amendments, and promote the "constitutional safeguards" of the world's tyrannies as equal, or superior, to our own. No Child Left Behind has established a national curriculum subjugating all disciplines to CCE's agenda. The CCE and related national standards are steeped in New Age pseudo-religion, radical environmentalism and multiculturalism, globalism, and post-modernist cynicism. American Youth Policy Forum and Service Learning proponents apparently accept CCE's agenda uncritically.

Character education, one is informed, is an NCLB-codified program that echoes a United Nations ""Peace Education" intitative of the same name. The U.N.'s Peace/Character Education program propagandizes youth in terms of the U.N. as the solution for world conflict (with enthusiasm apparently not the least dampened by the likes of the U.N.'s current Iraqi oil-for-food "mother of all kickback scandals"), and has been picked up by many schools via NCLB grant funding.

Rather than aiming to instill knowledge, these ideologues seek to produce a certain kind of human product. Behavioral change clearly refers to civic comportment that the paper's authors would have students exhibit. [This emphasis is characteristic of "transformational education," a movement that strives to redefine the purpose of education along these lines.]

That a group professedly deeply interested in America's well-being objects to any amount of increased emphasis in our scandalously lacking core disciplines is practically surreal.

Service Learning operatives portray themselves as on the cutting edge of positive educational reform. However, "innovations" like experiential learning (based on the notion that the more time pupils spend away from structured academic environments the better they master academic material), student-centeredness, democratic classroom, interdisciplinary instruction, contextual learning, and behavioral outcomes are among the anti-academic initiatives responsible for our educational crisis, and have been generally debunked. SL publications praise similarly detrimental concepts like cooperative learning, issues-based instruction, and group project emphasis, and sometimes speak in radical activist jargon.

The commitment against partisan politics is belied by SL's literature, and by the participation of the likes of William Galston (once chief speech writer for ultra-liberal - and self-described "world federalist" - John Anderson), the main speaker at one AYPF conference, where he advocated making every student a political activist through SL.

The "throughout the curriculum" mantra echoes CCE precepts, and means, in practice, that the producing of a particular human product trumps math, science, historical facts, grammar, etc.

A lengthy AYPF booklet ("Building an Effective Citizenry") advocates mandatory SL for all U.S. students. Some chapter titles:

And a remarkable quote: "Effective initiatives respect and recognize that youth can bring experience and knowledge" [to the solving of public policy problems]. [again, emphasis ours]

Service Learning is the activist corollary to the radical agenda that has incrementally assumed control of our schools (rendering academics increasingly pretentious and perfunctory). It has been institutionalized by NCLB and CCE. With SL, every American pupil is expected not only to internalize this ideology, but to act upon it. If SL is imperative to "the survival of our democracy," then there is no escaping it; conscription will be universal.

Service Learning is in - or coming to - your town, and it is driving curricula. SL is determined to engage each of our callow children in political activism. Ignore it at your peril.

Copyright © 2004 Charles R Lewis
Blanket permission granted to distribute for no cost, with proper references.

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