- Dr. James C. Kielsmeier, President and CEO, National Youth Leadership Council, USA
Dr. Kielsmeier spoke about his experience with service-learning, and the great potential that the partnership of national service and service-learning now have for education reform:
Rather than independent streams following parallel channels, national service and service-learning are today more like tributaries of a common watershed. The confluence of these seemingly disparate movements into a shared stream of service is having a particular impact on formal education. As witness to and participant in this more than fifteen-year change process, I foresee the potential for education reform that can result from further integration of service with schooling to be immeasurable. These are exciting times.
For me, it started in South Korea in 1966 ... in an attempt to get the US troops to change their attitudes and behaviour towards our allies - the South Korean civilians, and thus to improve relations, I, with the help of a South Korean Army liaison officer, devised a strategy which proved moderately effective and introduced me to a way of teaching that would change my life: placing American soldiers as volunteer English language tutors in the middle and high schools in the area.
The soldiers were trained as tutors by the Peace Corps, and the Korean schools were delighted with the effectiveness of the tutors. They were in great demand and we had no trouble finding volunteers to fill the slots in the schools. The Korean press publicized the story widely of how Korean/American goodwill was demonstrated through the tutoring partnership `English Language Assistance Programme', and the Army embraced it once it proved to be successful, and replicated it throughout Korea.
Years later, in one of America's grimmest inner cities, St. Louis, the wisdom of combining service and schooling was again revealed: I was helping to prepare 300 high school young people to mentor over 3,000 middle school students, five days a week, for ten weeks of the summer. The high school students' role as mentors was far more challenging than the `make-work' youth employment jobs which were common at that time. During training of the high school leaders, each morning began with a warm-up aerobic exercise. One of the high school students, Derek Jackson, always very punctual and involved in the training, suddenly left the aerobics session one morning. I eventually managed to get him to tell me that he'd been shot in the leg the previous evening at a party, and hadn't said anything because he really wanted to keep the mentoring job. He didn't want it because of the pay - there were a lot of other minimum wage jobs around - but because, as he put it, he knew that he would be making a contribution to the lives of kids he cared about. Happily, Derek's leg healed and he went on to be an outstanding leader that summer.
Two important contexts for linking service and learning are demonstrated in these examples: (i) full time national service and (ii) part time service - both tied to school improvement. These stories, and the larger experiences of which they were a part, were formative in my understanding of how schools and national service could be linked through the idea of service-learning.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in service-learning in the USA. The National Youth Leadership Council's (NYLC) called for a redefinition of national service beyond Americorps, a full-time programme for young adults, to a more inclusive idea that builds service into the fabric of every person's growing up experience. The result has been over $40million in funding annually through the Corporation for National Service to support service learning in schools and colleges, programmes that reached over 1 million people in 1997 (Boston, 1997). Independent state service-learning initiatives preceded and have lent support to the federal effort. The combined state and federal government groundswell has meant a multitude of opportunities for young people. Over 49% of US students grades 6 to 12 now volunteer on a regular basis (Nolin, 1997). In Minnesota the number of school-age youth in service has grown from 30,000 in 1989 to over 200,000 in 1996 (Community Education, 1997). This `new' national service, with its growing service-learning focus, has had a profound impact not only on developing new programmes, but is proving a catalytic change agent for the whole US education enterprise. Recently, for example, the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher's union, came out supporting service-learning; "NEA believes that service learning programmes should be encouraged" (NEA, 1997). Several powerful new umbrella national groups also embrace service in schools.
Prior to the surge in interest created through national service, service-learning in the U.S. and internationally has been largely a co-curricular, higher education phenomenon, tangled in a web of often unreadable educational jargon, and linked to experiential education. Hands-on or community-based learning is deemed highly suspect by discipline-bound, traditional educators and a far cry from the emphasis on `basic skills' that continues to dominate discussion and practice in English and American schools.
Meanwhile, there are strong signs of a growing disengagement of youth from society - increasing alienation and disengagement from their schools, parents, and society; escalations in social pathologies such as drug abuse, youth crime and violence, unwanted pregnancy and depression/suicide; and low levels of young voter participation - an early warning of a larger malaise that is accompanying the rapid economic expansion of the world economy. A kind of `affluenza' is creeping into our comfortable lives. The flourishing of civilisations has brought about unlimited wealth and comfort, and at the same time, impoverishment of the soul. Victor Frankl, the eminent psychiatrist and author of `Man's Search for Meaning' wrote: "The anguish of modern life is not caused by pain and suffering, but by not having a sense of meaning." He went on: "Those who have enough to live by do not have enough to live for" (Tice, 1997). From his experience in the death camps of World War II, Frankl, throughout his life advanced the idea of human beings being motivated more by the search for significant meaning, and not just by pleasure or power. Inundated by images and expectations that they should embrace a culture of material gain and personal wealth, young people themselves are among the early indicators that all is not well in a world of growing affluence.
Civil society will not survive without a new generation of engaged citizens. Bribing youth with more entertainment or possessions has produced neither gratitude nor enlightenment. Regulating and controlling has led to rebellion and destructive acts. Dead-end jobs paying little and teaching less are not the answer. A better path, advanced persuasively by the late Alec Dickson, founder of CSV, is to create opportunities for youth to be genuinely needed. A dialectic model serves to illustrate how engaging youth in service changes their role in society:
Thousands of students find themselves more often on the right side of this chart as meaning and purpose become part of curriculum in schools. Hear what one of my college students wrote in her journal about working with a group of mentally handicapped women: "Working with these women has helped me look at life with a totally new perspective. For one thing, I've appreciated my own mental and physical capabilities a lot more and realised what a wonderful feeling it is to be able to share part of it."
The classroom version of national service, service-learning, demands a creative link to subject matter and advancement of the central mission of schools: learning. As students in language classes tutor younger classmates and as biology students test water and air quality, creative teachers are finding ways to elicit a new level of knowing from their highly motivated students. Research on service-learning shows that if quality methods are employed, measurable results in the realms of academic achievement, self esteem, social responsibility and citizenship are realised. (Melchior, 1997; Scales, 1997).
A series of highly respected studies by the University of Wisconsin, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, describes the most effective methods of teaching as actively engaging students with subject matter in the manner of service-learning (Newman, 1995). These findings concur with the theories of Brazilian educator Paulo Friere, who, decrying what he called the banking concept of education (teachers seeking to make deposits into the brains of passive students), stated that learning requires dialogue, interaction, active problem-solving and high personal investment (Friere, 1973). Research at the National Education Lab in Bethel, Maine supports active learning methods such as service-learning. According to their research, we retain:
These two principles of progressive education: (i) a reconstructed view of young people as productive citizens and, (ii) an active, experiential model of teaching and learning combine in effective service-learning practices. The recognition of the educational worth of service-learning has resulted in widespread acceptance in the U.S. over the past five years.
The older model of national service had little to do with schooling. Newer thinking however, has recast national service as a developmental model that encourages young people to give back in the context of school. Meanwhile, changes in society suggest that if a new generation is to build the civil society of the future, they must be engaged in the practice of citizenship today through service-learning. Schools in this process become the incubators of civil society; teachers become the critical leaders of the new world being born.
Finally, no matter where or how young people come to be engaged in conscious acts of citizenship and service, a special kind of power is released suggested by the French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote, "The day will come when, after harnessing the ether (space), the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man (sic) will have discovered fire." (Teilhard de Chardin, 1934)
Harnessing the vast youth-filled institutions of education for the greater good through a bold new stream of national service - that includes service-learning - is changing schools. More importantly, people like the young volunteers in Korea, and Derek Jackson from St. Louis give hope to the possibility of a more civil society and peaceful world.
4th
Global conference on national youth service (1998) 
