Service-Learning Is a Powerful Tool

Edward F. Mulkerin III's column from Monday, October 3 ("Confi's Take on Coles") was an interesting and amusing insight to what some of our classes would be like if Robert Coles '50 were successful in incorporating community service into the curriculum. However, Mr. Mulkerin has a gross misperception of what service would really mean if integrated into the curriculum.

Service-learning, as this new idea in education is now popularly referred to, is not about receiving credit simply for tutoring poor kids from the inner-city or for spending a couple of hours kicking a soccer ball around at a nearby elementary school. Unfortunately, the popular perception of service-learning is exactly that: academic course credit for easy "gut" work done through community service.

Another perception of service-learning is that it forcibly imposes values of goodness and righteousness onto students. Both views are completely wrong, and Mr. Mulkerin unfortunately played on those two misperceptions to cast an unfairly negative light on a truly innovative and remarkable educational tool.

Service-learning enhances the academic learning that goes on in the classroom by taking students into the real world and providing real-life experiences that go hand in hand with what is taken down in the notebook during lectures and sections. It engages students and brings them up close to the material, which no longer seems so insignificant, boring or pointless. The key here is that in addition to the classroom work, not replacing it, students would have the opportunity to learn from what they observe and take away from working with the community.

Service-learning does not force students into politically correct values of moral responsibility. It does something much better: students are forced to examine and look deeply, introspectively into their own values, not necessarily to change them according to a set standard. One of the most valuable things education can do for students is to challenge them to think carefully and to be more aware about themselves in a personal way and about their relationship to the community. Service-learning is a vehicle for that kind of self-reflection that all too often regular classes lack.

Read Mr. Mulkerin's column with humor as you think about yet more requirements or additions to the core, or any classes, for that matter. But also think about your education, and keep your mind wide open to new ideas such as service-learning, which isn't as bad as Mr. Mulkerin would have it seem. Many people laugh it off and dismiss it because of faulty perceptions that are held towards "community service in our classes," but service-learning is indeed a very powerful tool in education and we cannot afford to ignore it. --Christopher C. Kim '98