Talking Points V - Kahne and Westheimer

In The Service of What? The Politics of Service Learning By Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer discusses the issues that differ between helping those in need and having a face to face interaction with those people. It also touches on whether or not these projects and services are used for political agendas. Finally it also discusses the types of people who are engaging in these types of services. I found the article to be pretty interesting. When the article discussed the part about students who were putting together care packages for the homeless without any interaction with them versus those who worked in a soup kitchen or in an actually homeless shelter. Those who did not make an actual interaction lost touch, in a sense of what they were actually doing. It’s not to say that they weren’t doing any good, but it makes it somewhat clear that they didn’t get a perspective from the people they were helping. Having that personal interaction in service learning causes the student to understand perspectives of those who are not from their social, economic, or political background. There is so much that can be learned from people through interactions and service learning projects.


Another interesting aspect was the concern higher class parents had for their children who would be doing service learning projects in lower class communities. From the exploitations of the media and word of mouth, parents began to fear for their children, feeding the assumptions they had heard about the neighborhood to their children. Their children who learned that it wasn’t true had an important interaction not only with the younger children they would work with, but understood what’s real from what’s fabricated, an assumption versus a truth. This helps younger students to grasp how the country works but also teaches them not to make the same assumptions that their parents make about a certain area that is not known to them.


Service learning, regardless of having a political agenda or not, is essential for young minds and the community. There is an interaction and a mutual respect for where we all live, it’s giving back to a school that you had graduated from, it’s cleaning a park you had played in when you were a child, it’s taking care of the homeless who might have, at one time, lived next door to you but soon lost their house due to foreclosures. America, to me, has been and should always be about community. It is our civic duty to be a part of that, maybe it was because I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other and we all looked out for each other; but that’s a part of being not only American but also being creatures of social interaction. It is rewarding for everyone to be a part of service learning, there’s personal growth and understanding on both sides of the spectrum.