So I'd like to talk for a moment about community service. I think that serving your community (however it is you choose to define community) is very important. Yet at the same time, I don't like outside forces dictating to me either who my community is or how I am supposed to serve them. It thus really catches me that the school I am student teaching at has a mandatory period of community service, which is a graduation requirement.
Now I highly doubt that any senior is going to grumble about serving their community. After all, a school is part of a community and as such should work to bring something back to the community. Yet at the same time, at least to me, it feels disingenuous to make that type of community service a requirement. A genuine desire to make your community a better place is a great thing; serving your community because you have to feels like it won't build up a spirit of community or social responsibility.
Of course there's another side to it as well. If students don't have mandatory community service, then how many will do it? My undergraduate college has a 'work day,' where students participate in beautifying the campus. I never participated. I felt that if I was going to serve my community, it shouldn't be just because it's the day everyone else is. Instead I would do things when the mood struck me or a particular problem caught my attention: I would throw out a bit of trash or sweep up some food garbage if it became particularly unsettling.
Can we expect students to gain a love for their community if serving it is a requirement? Do you become a better citizen because you really have to be? Just some food for thought.
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This always got under my skin as well. In high school, I didn't actually mind the compulsory community service (well, mostly because I didn't call it compulsory, but once you put it that way, it doesn't sound so great), but that's mostly because I've been doing community service since I was born, pretty much, so it seemed like a natural thought. What annoyed me then was how easily people got around it by calling things community service in name only and getting people to sign off on it. Lame.
ReplyDeleteM'boro was a different kind of antagonism, though. I did the first work day because I honestly wanted to join in and do stuff. After that first experience, though, the following work days became more and more desperate attempts, I felt, to enforce a spirit of community on campus. We had our own style of republicans, I'd say. They tried guilt tactics, even intimidation, all bundled up in a holier-than-thou-art attitude, along with a hypocritcal streak (clean today, leave beer cans everywhere tomorrow) that really turned me off.
Though, that first time was fun, even though prying a rock twice my size out of a hole in the ground I could have slept in did actually break my body. I was still floating on the outside of campus politics at that point, though.
Of course, the other problem with Marlboro work days was always, in my view, the substitution of symbolic work for the real thing. To commemorate the students who had to build their classrooms and furniture, and who even ten years ago participated in constructing a post-and-beam Campus Center, we will today plant flowers and pick up cigarette butts. My, what a great way to commemorate someone else's hard work, done of necessity--by volunteering to make the lawn pretty. My, yes, how interchangable.
ReplyDeleteI do see what you mean, too about the compulsory thing. For that matter, and I hope this doesn't seem a slam to you, but how many students would enjoy English classes more if their high schools either did not require them, or did not require so many? For that matter, if the goal is to learn the requirements for getting an A, or a B, and meet them, is learning ever going to be a primary objective for the student? It's truly frustrating all the way around.
In regards to the second part of the second comment, I thought I might send a news story that's been sent around to me a few times. It reminds me a lot of the Sudbury Model of teaching: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/30reading.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
ReplyDeleteLemme know whatcha think.