Service Learning Commons^™

Community Service And Civic Education, Harry C. Boyte

Civic Engagement

Community service, widely touted as the cure for young people's political apathy, in fact teaches little about the arts of participation in public life. To reengage students in public affairs requires redefining politics to include, in addition to electoral activity, ongoing citizen involvement in solving public problems. It requires a conceptual framework that distinguishes between public life and private life. And it calls for a pedagogical strategy that puts the design and ownership of problem-solving projects into the hands of young people.

Turning On Youth To Politics; Beyond Community Service, Harry C. Boyte

Civic Engagement

Studies by the Times Mirror Center ("The Age of Indifference") and others purport to reveal that today's teenagers and young adults view politics with nearly universal hatred and express apathy toward public affairs generally. A little more probing uncovers a more complex set of attitudes. Allan Moyle's film Pump Up the Volume, based in part on workshops with teenagers in New York, reveals a generation not so much apathetic as disgusted with adult hypocrisy, furious at adults' apparent inaction on mounting social problems, cynical about 1960s-style protest and uncertain about what else there is to do. But it is clear …

The Next Literacy: Educating Young Americans For Work And Citizenship, David Fleming

Civic Engagement

The emerging global economy presents the American workforce with many challenges. As national economic borders disintegrate and U.S. manufacturing jobs disappear, more and more opportunities are opening up in "complex services" (insurance, engineering, law, finance, computer programming, advertising) and "person-to-person service" (re- . tail, education, health care). Many of these new jobs offer high-skill, high-wage work; unfortunately, the majority of American workers lack the education and training for them. What those workers·are left with are an increasing number of low-skill, low-wage, nonunion jobs. One feature of this economy, then, is a growing split between the few who are benefiting from …

Democracy's Next Generation, Donna Fowler

Civic Engagement

A recent study conducted for People For the American Way recommends three ways schools can help students develop the values and habits of responsible citizenship.

Teaching Twenty-First Century Citizenship: Social Psychological Foundations, Allan R. Brandhorst

Civic Engagement

Effective American (U.S.) citizenship in the Twenty-first century may require a shift in the value orientation which currently characterizes American life. Two components of the American value system are becoming increasingly dysfunctional. American social science, and accordingly the social studies curriculum, has become narrowly focused on an economic model of human decision-making. Such a one-dimensional model of man, because it invalidates by omission justice-based models of decision-making, leaves American society with a reduced capacity for addressing social dilemmas, particularly commons-type problems. Secondly, American cultural life has been dominated by a heavy and one-sided commitment to primary control. Such an imbalance, …

Public Talk And Civic Action: Education For Participation In A Strong Democracy, Benjamin R. Barber

Civic Engagement

Civic education programs have always played a distinctive role in the American education curriculum. For the most part, however, civic education has been associated with civic knowledge and the cultivation of a cognitive faculty thought to be identical with political judgement (private judgment on public issues).

Perhaps this has been appropriate to a society which understood democracy primarily as a system of accountability in which elected representatives do most of the actual governing and "citizens" limit themselves to the passive roles of voter and watchdog.

The Civic Mission Of The University, Benjamin R. Barber

Civic Engagement

The modern American university is embroiled in controversy, fueled by deep uncertainty over its pedagogical purposes and its civic role in a "free" society. At times the college establishment seems to know neither what a free society is not what the educational requisites of freedom might look like. Nonetheless, both administrators and their critics have kept busy, for like zealots (classically defined as people who redouble their efforts when they have forgotten their aims), they have covered their confusion by embellishing their hyperbole. They wring hands and rue the social crises of higher education... apathy, cynicism, careerism, prejudice, selfishness, sexism, …

Youth Entering Service To America, Yes To America

Civic Engagement

George Bush announced today his proposal for the creation of Youth Entering Service to America, a challenge grant program designed to spur more young people to serve their communities as a continuing androutine part of their daily lives in high schools, college, and after graduation.

Fostering Civic Responsibility, Constitutional Rights Foundation

Civic Engagement

This issue features: Fostering Civic Responsibility Through Service Learning; Program Profiles; and CityWorks: A Curriculum Model for Teaching Local Government Through Research and Service Learning.