In The Service Of What? The Politics of Service Learning: Kahne and Westheimer

1. "Service learning can advance other priorities, such as the acquisition of vocational skills."

This quote states that there are many things to learn from Service Learning. By volunteering we learn what it is like for other people, to have compassion for those who are less fortunate, we learn who we are and how we fit into this world, service learning helps develop life skills, and as this quote says service learning helps us acquire vocational skills as well. I feel that this reason, along with many others is why service learning should have a place in all schools, especially high schools. I know many of my classmates in high school had no idea what they wanted to do "when they grew up", I think this is mostly because we are never given the opportunity to really try our hand at an occupation until we are finally forced to decide what we want to major in in college. This is why so many people end up changing their majors after paying thousands of dollars, because they simply had no idea what the career that they chose was actually going to be like. If service learning was a part of high schools students would not only get the chance to help their community, and learn all of the above things that I already mentioned, service learning would give students the occupation to perhaps select to volunteer in a position related to the field they are interested in going into and thus would also get a chance to see what that career is like all while learning vocational skills that would help them later on should they select this career. This of course is also true in college as well as we all have begun our service learning projects. I think it is great that we get a chance to see what it is like in the classroom setting early in our education program at RIC because it gives us a chance to see if this career is really the right choice before it is 'too late'.

2. "For example: a music director at a middle school we studied wanted her suburban upper-middle class students to perform at a nearby elementary school in a poor neighborhood. Some of the middle school parents objected, saying that they were concerned for their children's safety. In a written evaluation, the students said that they had imagined "horrifying children running around on a dirty campus." they had expected them to be "rude, tough, noisy, and very unfriendly." They had even thought they would be "mean, gang-related blacks." One of the students wrote, "I was scared because my mom had told me it was a bad neighborhood and to careful."

This quote most certainly reminded me of how many of the people in our class reacted to having to go to Providence Public Schools for their Service Learning placements. The children in this article were all scared of going to the school for the same exact reasons our classmates were: we were scared of what we had heard, we were scared of the mental picture we had created of these schools based on the rumors we hear about urban schools. Like the middle school students who performed at the urban elementary school we have all found that our initial assumptions about what these schools would be like have been proven completely wrong. The thing I think is important to remember about urban school districts is that the crime rates, for example, are a reflection of the adults living in this area and not the children going to school here. When we think of a poor urban neighborhood many of us tend to think of words such as "rude, and dirty", as the kids in this middle school did, it is important to remember that being from a poor area has nothing to do with how friendly someone is or what the school campus looks like. This quote shows that Service Learning teaches us that our assumptions based on what we have heard are often false.

3. "Democratic politics," Benjamin Barber writes. "has become something we watch rather than something we do."

This quote really struck me because it is just so true. A democratic government, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, is a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people" and yet, sadly, politics, as this quote says, have turned into a spectator sport. People have no problem sitting there and criticizing how our government works but very rarely do they make the effort to actually change what they don't like. Service Learning is one of the many ways that citizens can take an active role in being a part of our democracy rather than just watching it.

This article, honestly, was probably my least favorite so far. I did however find some of the material interesting; I liked reading the part about how the middle school students and parents reacted to going to an urban school, it was interesting to compare their reaction to the way members of our class reacted. I also liked how the article showed the different ways service learning is used in the classroom, such as in Mr. Johnson and Ms. Adams classes, along with the different lessons that can be gained from service learning. I thought that as a whole this article was hard to get through simply because it is written so blandly. Besides when I read the few examples that were given I often found my mind wondering throughout the article and had to keep reading the same parts over and over because I would lose my focus. This article was certainly not a page turner.