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April 19, 2006

Service Protesting

I saved this link a few days ago and never got around to posting on it. Some students are getting school credit for attending the pro illegal immigration rallies.

The Montgomery County schools' decision to grant students community service credit for attending Monday's immigration rights protest is raising concern among some parents as well as activists who say officials should focus on education, not political advocacy.

Montgomery is the only Washington area school system offering students credit for taking part in the event, to be held on the Mall -- a decision Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said is consistent with how the system has operated.

'This is nothing new,' schools spokesman Brian K. Edwards said about the decision. 'Advocacy is allowed.'

I am ok with this, not because I think it is a good thing that students are promoting anarchy or that the school is in any way endorsing lawlessness, but because I think public school service requirements should be completely abolished. Whether or not someone does community service has nothing to do with them mastering the knowledge and skills they are supposed to be getting from a public school education. If the kids can get credit for their 60 hours of required service by doing something they would be doing anyways more power to them. This example also shows the flaws in service learning by showing how little children actually learn by doing serivce learning. What exactly will these kids learn by going to a protest? Those 60 hours would be better spent having them do science experiments, read a book, or go to a museum. And we wonder why our children are not learning.

And so far this ignores the moral problems of having a government entity forcing children into unpaid labor. I have worked with private school service learning projects before and the students did not learn anything there either, but at least those students and their families voluntarily picked a school that had that requirement.

Posted by Pete at April 19, 2006 08:06 AM

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Comments

Are they going to give them 60 hours credit for walking out? If not, why is this such a bad thing? They were, at least ideally, practically applying what they were supposed to learn. You and I are a different brand of learner. We can learn by reading, doing experiments, and going to museums. Some kids need to see that practical application of what they are learning. If the kids that you worked with did not learn from their service learning project, then it was not done right.

Posted by: Jeff at April 20, 2006 05:36 PM

There is no indication these kids are going to learn to learn from this experience. Service learning can be done right and my wife used to run a service learning program for a public middle school so I have seen it done correctly, but that requires things like the service project being supervised by an educator to relate the activity to what they are learning and students explaining what they learned and how it applies to their studies (I believe the technical term for that is reflection).

Most school service requirements like the one mentioned in the story and the one at the current high school my wife works at completely leave out the learning part and just require students to turn in a form that says they volunteered somewhere for X amount of hours. The form does not ask them how or what they learned and the schools usually do nothing to see that the kids actually learned anything. And if you do not turn in the form you do not graduate.

Schools are supposed to be about teaching students, not getting a free source of labor because some state legislator thought that is a good idea. In my wife's current case it is a private religious school so the service is supposeed to be for moral reasons as well, but the students are usually doing it for mercanary reasons, not because they actually want to serve.

Posted by: Pete at April 21, 2006 07:47 AM

Yeah, good service learning is really effective. That is what our school does. They work on an issue as a class, create a presentation, and take some kind of action. Our kids do their service learning as part of their US History class. The school where Amanda used to teach does community service, which kids often clear by answering phones in the office after school or doing other manual labor. That is pointless to me, but showing some kind of political activism seems to be a positive thing. I'm not saying a agreed with the walkouts, but I like to see kids care about something.

Posted by: Jeff at April 21, 2006 01:04 PM