APA Committee on the
Teaching of Philosophy

Service-Learning in Philosophy

Opening remarks at APA Panel on "Service-Learning in Philosophy" sponsored by the Committee on Teaching Philosophy, December 29, 1999

David A. Hoekema, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan

(Note: these remarks were adapted from the foreword to a forthcoming volume, Beyond the Tower: Philosophy in Service-Learning, edited by Edward Zlotkowski (American Association for Higher Education, forthcoming, 2000)

Anyone who has chosen philosophy as a field of study, whether on the undergraduate or the graduate level, has had to face an insistent question from skeptical family members: "What does philosophy have to do with the real world?" History does not record the first time this challenge was put to a philosopher, but no doubt it was already a familiar question by the time Thrasymachus launched it, with particularly biting sarcasm, at Socrates in Book I of the Republic. Certainly no contemporary American student has escaped it entirely.

But the speakers on this panel put forward the suggestion that a new answer is being formed from the experience of philosophy instructors and students across the country.

There has been a quiet revolution in undergraduate education during the past decade or two, a revolution whose standard-bearers were the pioneers of service-learning as an element of liberal arts education. A generation ago, every college and university had a catalog full of academic programs, and many of them also maintained an active policy of encouraging students to volunteer for service to local organizations and agencies. But few campuses, and few students, saw any identifiable relationship between these two parts of the picture.

Today that situation has changed dramatically: voluntary service to meet community needs has become an integral part of the academic experience of many students. Careful and critical reflection on how academic study informs one’s role in community service, and on how community experiences illuminate and flesh out academic studies, has come to be highly valued by students, faculty, and institutions across the nation. The service-learning revolution has brought modest but important changes to nearly every college and university.

The service-learning movement has posed the same challenge for philosophy as the skeptical relative, in slightly revised form: what does the study of philosophy have to do with the real world of community service? It is not hard, after all, to understand how students of twentieth-century history can benefit from spending some time working with neighborhood associations, or to identify some significant links between the topics studied in a sociology or economics class and the challenges of helping a welfare client apply for a job or a senior citizen arrange for home health care. In English composition and studio art classes, an assigned essay or portfolio of drawings can be linked to a student’s experiences as a playground helper or a tutor in an urban school. But what about philosophy? How can a class devoted to musing about whether there is any real world, or about whether numbers and emotions and moral rules exist, possibly lend itself to effective service-learning? How can philosophers, whose heads are notoriously enveloped in high banks of clouds, come down to earth in ways that make effective use of community service?

Thanks to the work of today’s panel participants, and of hundreds of others in the profession as well, service-learning has come to be one of the means by which students learn philosophy and confront foundational questions of meaning, value, and responsibility. The connections between volunteer experience and philosophical exploration are most readily apparent in courses on social ethics and political philosophy. But there have also been successes, some of them documented here, in using service-learning to shed light on other areas of philosophy, from philosophy of art to epistemology. The pedagogical creativity of these examples may inspire readers to carry the study of other philosophical areas—metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, existential philosophy, and more—into "the real world," to intersect with the experiences that voluntary service can provide.

Having spent most of my two decades in academia in administrative positions, I have not yet had the opportunity to incorporate a service-learning component into my own courses. (It is on my task list for the near future, when I return to full-time teaching.) I have, however, had frequent occasion to observe the profound changes that occur in a colleague’s courses—and sometimes in the colleague himself or herself, as a teacher and as a philosopher—as a result of such ventures.

I recall talking many years ago with a highly regarded colleague who had become deeply disillusioned with students’ apathy and passivity, despairing of his ability to awaken and motivate them in his introductory philosophy classes. Over the course of a few years, as he began to participate in a number of ventures on his campus and elsewhere that involved some form of service-learning, his outlook changed completely. He told me on one occasion, exaggerating only slightly, that he had found the key to overcoming student apathy, and it was the incorporation of community service and reflection on it into his philosophy courses. Going out into the community and seeing how institutions meet or fail to meet the needs of real people, he observed, compels students to come out of their campus cocoons and take both themselves and others more seriously.

Another colleague has spoken about how difficult it was to get students to acknowledge the difficulties and ambiguities of moral choices that they regarded as purely black and white until they spent a few hours in community service agencies. Watching real people who struggled to know what was right—whether to have an abortion or carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, whether to tolerate a teenager’s alcohol abuse or to evict him from the household until he goes straight—they began to understand the messiness and difficulty of genuine moral choices in situations where every option seems to mingle good and evil.

Conversely, the uncritical relativism that many students bring to their study of philosophy, the attitude "my morality is true for me and yours is true for you," is one of the first illusions to die when students apply philosophical categories to situations they may encounter in their communities. Few people are insensitive enough to fall back on such evasions when they confront the horrors of parental abuse and neglect, on the one hand, or the inspiring example of a high-school principal who won’t let his staff or his students give up their ideals, on the other. Whether their starting point is an excessively dichotomized moral world or a vague complacency that sees only gray, students learn from community service that good and evil, justice and injustice, compassion and cruelty, are very real—and very different.

Service-learning will not turn a struggling teacher into a star. Nor will it solve our most perplexing philosophical problems about the nature of the person or the reality of evil. Rather, it is a tool that, in the hands of a skilled and dedicated teacher of philosophy, can help our students understand that ideas matter, that critical reasoning solves some problems, and that the real world is actually a very good place to do philosophy.

APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy

Service-Learning in Philosophy

APA Committee on the
Teaching of Philosophy