talking point #5 In The Service of What?

     In this blog posting I will choose three quotes from the assigned text, "In The Service Of What?" by Joseph Kahne, and explain what they mean as well as their relation to the text.
    
     The first passage from the article that I would like to quote is actually quoted from a report titled "The Forgotten Half.  This quote reads as follows "Students tutor, coach softball, paint playgrounds and read to the elderly because they are interested in people, or because they want to lean a little about poverty and racism before they head out into the waiting corporate world.... We do not volunteer 'to make a statement,' or to use the people we work with to protest something.  We try to see the homeless man, the hungry child, and the dying woman as the people the are, not as the means to some political end."  In short this quote describes the relationships people form with the people they volunteer with, as well as why.  Many people volunteer for more political reasons, such as celebrities donating money to a charity to make themselves appear caring, but service learning projects are not about that.  They are about exploring ones talents and using them to help another, as well as learning about a person, condition or group of people, through first hand accounts.  This helps to build a strong force of knowledge and understanding as well as supporting a sense of empathy, before students graduate and face the "real world"

     "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,' and they 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 be careful.'"  This quote shows the beliefs and mind states of students before the service learning projects.  I found this passage to be provocative in the way it brings up topics we try to deny, such as stereotypes.  However these issues are very real and sheltered students may not know any better than to fall into these false generalizations about populations.

     "After they returned, the students' perspectives on these elementary school children has changed.  They were 'surprised at the children's responsiveness, and their attentiveness, 'they found the children to be 'extremely polite and surprisingly friendly,' and they discovered that they 'listened well and had excellent behavior.'  One student wrote, 'everyone at the school had good manners, and i think more highly of [the neighborhood] now.'"  This quote shows the insight students can develop through this hands on learning in the community.  In addition to students feeling good about helping others they also get to learn that people are not usually as horrid as stereotypes make them out to be.  This type of knowledge will make students think twice before believing the stereotypes they hear, as well as hopefully inspire them not to spread rumors they know little about because they might be spreading the false.