Moral education and ethical development in community service practice

¶ … organization/agency, where you performed your community service including its mission, goals, size, people it serves, the organizational culture, history, etc.

When I began my work at the agency, the assumption that was that I was appalled by the ability of teachers and students to explore profound moral truths separate from simple decencies of conduct. We all needed to confront actual moral situations and to make moral judgments and moral decisions in contexts that were not comfortable and familiar. Ethics poses its intellectual difficulties to be sure. But it is not enough to talk a good ethics game; my students, like my philosophic peers, were good at interesting talk (Hall & John, 2006). Concern for introducing a certain ethical realism to students was by no means new. It was shared by the many fellow wanderers that I met in seminars and conferences on moral education. It was a deeply felt problem for my colleagues in the Ethical Culture-Fieldston Schools. As one of them noted,

To be sure, our alumni did tell us that Fieldston's ethics classes, which they had resisted as students, remained among the significant influences on their lives after leaving school. As reported in answering the question, "What have been your community service activities and interests as an adult?"

The replies . . . consisted, almost exclusively, of listings of organization by name. Their summaries, therefore, comprise similar; though not identical listings. . . . The nature of the replies here was such as to preclude conclusions beyond the fact that the alumni of these Ethical Culture Schools, as represented by this sample, are active in numerous and varied community services and activities in localities across the country. While the study has, unfortunately, not been repeated, annual questionnaires revealed the continuing activist and participant character of many alumni. Anecdotal records corroborated the finding. No doubt, a similar picture would emerge from other schools guided by moral idealism and a tradition of social reform.

How did you get the community service placement?

Effective moral education, however, is not merely the concern of the school. For example, I recall many a conversation with Lawrence Kohlberg who granted me the placement, his colleagues as they developed their ideas of the "just community" (Hall & John, 2006). They too were caught in the puzzles involved in connecting moral conduct with moral cognition. All of us were struggling with a perennial problem of ethics. In fact, more than 2,000 years ago, it was addressed by Aristotle,

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching . . . while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit. [E].g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Who trained or oriented you?

I was moved by what seemed obvious, the Aristotelian idea; introduced to me by Prof. E. Vedder who trained me: ethics is as ethics does. But it wasn't quite that easy as I well knew and as, I suspect, Aristotle knew too. So, at the same time, I lived with a troubled conscience. The failure of students; and their teachers; to act morally challenged the truthfulness of the claim to be doing moral education and yet that was a claim that I and others were making. In looking for a remedy, I turned to community service. Because it was accessible and institutionally manageable, it seemed an obvious place in which to locate moral action and in which to test moral education. It offered the chance to make a visible difference in moral situations. Above all, it seemed a ready way to deal with the troubled conscience of the moral educator.

How did you your responsibilities relate to your major (Marketing)?

Marketing seemed a more promising way of understanding the place of community service in moral education. Students would be in position to explore the moral situation, to experience its pains and rewards, and to enrich their moral experience. Community service was a way of making tangible differences in the lives of people. So learning would be informed by the experience of achievement and of failure. And this in turn was yet another kind of learning. In short, community service was a praxis, neither entirely theoria nor entirely techne (Stukas, et al. 1999; Spaide, 1999). With community service, marketing could complete itself much as an art completes itself.

I saw community service as means of improving marketing that otherwise ran the danger of intellectual and moral arrogance (Hoy & Bradford, 2006). but, I was not yet paying enough attention to what this would look like from a student's perspective. I was modifying curriculum. but, the student wanted to act and not just to know (Hoy & Bradford, 2006) I was still taking the position of the other. Yes, I was looking for the formation of habits of action and not simply of habits of inquiry. Students, by contrast, were more directly caught up in a moral reality. I realized that my motivation placed me in a limbo between classroom and world. It lacked the very engagement I wanted for students. And yet, engagement is in the character of ethics and the peculiar talent of the young. Not entirely caught in the patterns, routines, and demands of the social life of adults, they are accessible to experience in ways that an adult must struggle; often unsuccessfully-to achieve. Finally, then, community service needed to catch my own moral passions and not just my passions as a teacher if it was not to become just classroom "enrichment" (Hansmann, 2007).

Describe 3-5 defining moments in your community service placement.

I was comforted by the fact that community service had already played a role in my own moral education and in the moral education of students. I knew that community service was not a new idea. Indeed, it had, from the outset, been part of the life of the schools I worked most closely with. Thus, one of my predecessors as head of the Ethics Department, commented,

Community service; helping in a settlement house or camp, caring for children in a day nursery, first-hand experience in an election campaign-makes students more aware of the needs and character of our society than any textbook could do. This awareness is reinforced when a school makes its own resources and facilities available to the community; as we do through the Fieldston School Art Center and the Fieldston Day Camp. A student's ability to function in the wider community takes on increased importance with Fieldston's work-service requirement for graduation. By looking at my own experience and at students' experiences, I might find ways of grasping the interaction of effective pedagogy and of personal commitment which were caught up in my subject. That, at least, was where my search for community service began to take me.

I reflected on my own career. It was a reminder and a caution. I had been the leader of an Ethical Culture Society, and had come to know the pains and rewards of the "helping" relationship. I had been a volunteer, had done my share of envelope-stuffing and board memberships and all the many tasks in between. I had served on the committees and boards of a county and state health and welfare council, a coordinating body for voluntary and tax-supported community serving agencies. For several years, I had served on the county hospital and on the county mental health boards as well. When not engaged in these volunteer and "policy" roles, I was directly at work with people in need of counseling or jobs or housing (Yates & Youniss, 2006).

I was struck by how much of my experience was shaped by professional staffs who were often trapped into behaving as functionaries and, above all, how uncritical the experience was for all of us (Yates & Youniss, 2006). To be sure, there were problems to be solved; usually those of budgets and personnel. Only occasionally would we debate our mission and its priorities. More often, our concerns had to do with money and public relations. I recalled endless attention to operational matters, often tedious, never resolved, and always recurring. Seldom, however, did we address the meaning of what we were doing; it was enough, apparently, to be doing good things. I was, in short, a good volunteer.

Looking back, I realized how busy it all was; for me, for the many others who were similarly engaged. I realized, too, how easy it was to encourage others to be as busy. There was always so much that needed doing. Problems came fast and often and even if I had been inclined to stop and reflect, they couldn't wait (Yates & Youniss, 2006). So, it was all too easy to get lost in the doing and all too easy to let others shape it or, which was as likely, to let programs grow like Topsy. Indeed, as I looked backward, I realized that those who were supposed to be responsible for reflection were as caught up in practice as I was. At the same time, I realized that I did not regret the experience. Clearly it had its satisfactions. Satisfaction, I reminded myself, however, could bring its own dangers, particularly the dangers of benevolent arrogance.

I was led from thinking about my experience to multiply rather than resolve questions about the connections between community service and moral education. I understood that mere exposure like mere activity would not do. Nor was it possible by means of a division of labor to assign action to some and thinking to others. or, to put this another way, I had to keep the idea of the classroom as vivid as the idea of service. I knew how tempting it was to conclude from the ethics classroom's limitations that it could be replaced altogether by community service. Finally, I had to avoid thinking of community service as "experience" and classroom as something else.

I reflected on my years as director of an "independent"; that is, private; school. It was easy enough to understand the "privileged" status of most of my students and their families and therefore the consequent dangers of moral indifference on the one hand and self-righteousness on the other. As a teacher in the Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York put it,

Students in independent schools often have very little sense of living in a community let alone the notion of serving this community. . . . Most of our students come from families that have the financial resources to buy needed services and therefore seldom experience the need for community cooperation to provide service . . . The world they experience seems to require money and lots of it for services to be rendered (American Hospital Association, 1988).

How would you recommend the organization/agency to others? Would you continue to volunteer there after your requirement is completed?

Community service can help Marketing students learn firsthand about human tragedy and the truth that we do not completely control our lives which is not that evident in the financial and marketing world. On a recent work camp serving the homeless, a student was shocked to find a Bryn Mawr graduate homeless. Previously, her world view said if you worked hard enough and got into a good college, like Bryn Mawr, you were set for life. . . . Now she was confronted first hand with the truth, no doubt presented in her history and literature courses, that life has a tragic dimension that can frustrate our best efforts. I was tempted to think that the privileged status of private school students somehow presented a unique opportunity for community service (Yates & Youniss, 2006). But the thought of privilege also took a different turn.

Do you think required community service placements are a good idea for Management School students? Why or why not?

I realized that anyone doing community service was inevitably going to be in some kind of privileged position so I think they are a good idea for Management School student, if for no other reason than the fact that he or she was able to be a doer. Privilege, in other words, was a structural problem. So, for example,

Rubber soles padded soundlessly along a hallway of Coler Memorial Hospital recently as Yaninth Maldonado guided an elderly man in a wheelchair to a nearby day room. With each step, Ms. Maldonado, a teenage mother with an eighth-grade education moved closer to her own goal: attaining a college diploma. Ms. Maldanado, a soft-spoken 18-year-old, joined the City Volunteer Corps of New York shortly before Christmas last year. She turned to the group, the largest urban full-time youth service organization in the United States, hoping that its offerings of public service projects, class-room work and college assistance programs would speed her on her chosen way. The source of privilege might vary, but the pattern of relationship did not. And this, in turn, alerted me to the way that diversity of position, a certain inequality, is unavoidable (American Hospital Association, 1988). That called for an acknowledgment of the politics of authority embedded in community service. Of course, I talked with friends and colleagues and students. Like me, most of them saw immediate connections between moral education and community service and agreed that "it was a good idea," even "a natural." The doing itself seemed to present few difficulties. After all, the needs were clear enough and the responses they called for; reading to a patient, helping out in a nursing home, tutoring a child, planting a tree, raising money; were not particularly complicated. So typical was this agreement that I wondered if my growing sense of the complexities of service was not just a result of my philosophic habits. After all, I was professionally expected to find difficulties where no one else did; as with epistemological problems of perception that no one but philosophers raise or with common moral ideas like honesty that no one but philosophers find problematic. At the same time, I couldn't ignore the questions raised by my own experience or by my exploration of the literature or by reports of the experience of others.