Service Learning and Multiple Models of Engaged Citizenship

Abstract

a merican high school and university students perform commu/' nity service in record numbers. According to the most recent survey of incoming university freshman, more than 80 percent of students undertook volunteer work in high school (Sax, 2005). But while volunteering is on the rise, political interest and engagement among youth is declining. These two trends lead to an uncomfortable question: has community service work become a substitute for political engagement and activity among young people? If so, this would be a grave blow to many educators, who had hoped that service learning programs would lead to a rise in civic and political engagement. Empirical research will provide an answer to this uncomfortable question. Preliminary results seem to indicate that when service learning and volunteer programs are designed with an eye toward civic and political engagement, they do indeed have civic and political payoffs (Owen, 2000). I am convinced that service learning programs ought to be designed, so far as possible, to avoid the possibility that volunteer work becomes a substitute for political engagement. Nevertheless, my interest here is in defending a version of service learning and volunteer work that has little or no political payoff, and indeed little or no civic payoff. It is a version of service work that aspires to provide nothing more than relief to the needy and quite consciously ignores, even rejects, politics. My defense of apolitical service learning is unorthodox. Rather than offering my own arguments, I shall rely primarily on the words of one of the many interesting students I have come across in my decade of teaching at Stanford University. Emilie graduated in 2001 from Stanford. She volunteered sometimes up to 20 hours a week at an organization called ARIS (AIDS