The Movement-Building Potential of Service Learning
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Campus Service Learning Camp
Fenton, Michigan, September 19, 2004
I want to thank the organizers of this weekend
encampment on Student Service Learning for inviting me to
close out this conference. At the age of 89, going on 90, I
have to be very selective about which speaking invitations
to accept. I wanted to be here this morning so that I could
share my thoughts on the movement-building potential of
service learning.
Recently I asked Laura DePalma, a University of Michigan
student who is active in Detroit Partnership (a project in
which student volunteers work with Detroit elementary and
middle school students in cooperation with Motor City
Blockbusters) how other students view her community
activism. Some, she said, call it “awesome,” Others view
it as “charity.”
I think those who dismiss it as “charity” reveal their
own short-sightedness. Personally and politically I am awed
by the increasing numbers of university students who over
the last twenty years have been signing up for community
service projects. According to one estimate, approximately
two-thirds of the college student population now engage in
service-learning activities.
Thirty years ago, reflecting on the great movements
of the 20th century – labor, civil rights, women’s, Native
American, Latino and Asian American – my late husband,
Jimmy Boggs, and I wrote REVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY. In it we explained that these movements
were revolutionary because they grappled with the fundamental
contradiction - of giving priority to economic and technological
development over human and political development –
which had been built into the founding of this country.
Because this contradiction is so organic, it keeps
manifesting itself around new issues. So movement
activists need to be on the alert to identify these issues and
encourage struggles that go beyond rebellion because they
begin to create the new values, new truths, new relationships
and new infrastructures that are the foundation for a new
society.
Today, as we enter the 21st century, this
fundamental contradiction is manifesting itself
simultaneously in all the basic, interconnected and
seemingly insolvable issues that are on the American agenda
- the jobless recovery, the deepening schools crisis, global
warming, the increasing inequality between the global
North and the global South, the war in the Middle East –
each and every issue challenging everyone of us, even more
than the movements of the 20th century, to redefine almost
everything in our culture.
For example, how are we going to make our livings in an
age when Hi-Tech and the export of jobs overseas have
brought us to the point where the number of workers needed
to produce goods and services is constantly diminishing?
Where will we get the imagination, the courage and the
determination to reconceptualize the meaning and purpose
of Work in a society that is becoming increasingly jobless?
What is going to happen to cities like Detroit that were once
the arsenal of democracy? Now that they’ve been abandoned
by industry, are we just going to throw them away? Or can
we rebuild, redefine and respirit them as models of 21st
Century self-reliant, sustainable multicultural communities?
Who is going to begin this new story?
How do we address the catastrophe that 30-50% of inner
city children drop out of school, thus ensuring that large
numbers will end up in prison? Is it enough to call for
“Education, not Incarceration”? Or do we need to replace
our outmoded factory models of schooling with more
democratic and community-building models like, for
example, the Freedom Schools created during Mississippi
Freedom Summer and Detroit Summer?
What is going to motivate us to start caring for our
biosphere instead of using our mastery of technology to
increase the volume and speed at which we are making our
planet uninhabitable for other species and eventually for
ourselves?
How are we going to build a 21st century America in which
people of all races and ethnicities live together in harmony,
and Euro-Americans in particular embrace their new role as
one among many minorities constituting the new multi-
ethnic majority?
And, especially since 9/11, how are we to achieve
reconciliation with the two-thirds of the world that
increasingly resents our economic, military and cultural
domination? As the chickens come home to roost for our
invasion of Iraq, where will we get the courage and the
imagination to win by losing? What will help us recognize
that we have brought on our vulnerability by our own
arrogant insistence that our concept of Freedom represents
the culmination of human evolution and is therefore destined
to dominate the world. Can the very real dangers that we
now face from terrorists challenge us to face the
contradictions in our own way of life and begin creating a
new paradigm of our selfhood and our nationhood? Or are
we so locked into nationalism, racism and determinism that
we will be driven to seek scapegoats for our frustrations and
failures - as the Germans did after World War I, thus aiding
and abetting the onset of Hitler and the Holocaust?
We live at a very dangerous time because these questions are
no longer abstractions. Our lives, the lives of our children
and future generations, and even the survival of the planet
depend on our willingness to transform ourselves into
active planetary and global citizens who, as Martin Luther
King Jr. put it, “develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as
a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual
society.”
The time is already very late and we have a long way to go
to meet these challenges. Over the decades of economic
expansion, urbanization and suburbanization that began with
the so-called American Century after World War II, tens of
millions of Americans, perhaps the majority, have become
increasingly self-centered and materialistic, more concerned
with our possessions and individual careers than with the
state of our neighborhoods, cities, country and planet,
closing our eyes and hearts to the many forms of violence
that have been exploding in our inner cities and in powder
kegs all over the rest of the world – both because the
problems have seemed so insurmountable and because just
struggling for our own survival has consumed so much of
our time and energy.
At the same time the various identity struggles of the 20th
century, while remediating to some degree the great wrongs
that have been done to workers, African Americans, Native
Americans and other people of color, women, gays and
lesbians, and while helping to humanize our society overall,
have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have
encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than
as self-determining, more as victims of “isms” ( racism,
sexism, capitalism) than as human beings who have the
power of choice and who for our own survival must
assume individual and collective responsibility for creating
a new nation that is loved rather than feared and that does
not have to bribe and bully other nations to win support.
These are the times that try our souls. Each of us needs to
undergo a tremendous philosophical and spiritual
transformation. Each of us needs to be awakened to a
personal and compassionate recognition of the inseparable
interconnection between our minds, hearts, and bodies,
between our physical and psychical well-being, and between
our selves and all the other selves in our country and in the
world. Each of us needs to stop being a passive observer of
the suffering that we know is going on in the world and in
our own country and start identifying with the sufferers.
Each of us needs to make a leap that is both practical and
philosophical, beyond determinism to self-determination.
Each of us has to be true to and enhance our own humanity
by embracing and practicing the conviction that as human
beings we have Free Will; that despite the powers and
principalities that are bent on objectifying and
commodifying us and all our human relationships, the
interlocking crises of our time require that we exercise the
power within us to make principled choices in our ongoing
daily and political lives, choices that will eventually
although not inevitably (there are no guarantees), make a
difference.
How are we going to bring about these transformations?
Politics as usual, i.e. debate and argument, even voting, are
no longer sufficient. Our system of representative
democracy, which was created by a great revolution, no
longer engages the hearts and minds of the great majority of
Americans. Vast numbers of people no longer bother to go
to the polls, either because they don’t care what happens to
the country or the world, or because they don’t believe that
voting will make a difference on the profound and inter
connected issues that really matter. Even organizing or
joining massive protests against disastrous policies and
demands for new policies are not enough because they do
not encourage the kind of self-examination and
self-transformation that are needed to build a movement to
create another America that will be viewed by the world as a
beacon rather than as a danger.
That is why I believe student service learning has such
movement building potential. Out of their dissatisfaction
with university education that is preparing them for
positions at the highest level of the U.S.
military-technological complex, tens of thousands of
students are seeking new forms of education that bring them
closer to and serve grassroots communities.
Just the other day, for example, I received the following
email from a Duke student who had been given one of my
Michigan Citizen columns on education by one of her
professors,
“ Here at Duke, “ she writes, “I am perpetually thinking
about how to re-think and re-act the way we learn and for
what reason, with recognition that our notions of
education--that is how we learn—is directly related to the
way we organize ourselves into active and meaningful
political communities. I would like to engage myself and
other college students in a kind of learning that is liberating,
experiential, and community-based, that does not confine
knowledge and learning within traditional classroom walls
or presume knowledge and responsibility to be monopolized
by preconceived experts. Even in the university setting, we
fail to realize our own capacity as ‘students’ to direct and
define our learning, to value the knowledge and experiences
we already have, and to continue to learn through action and
reflection/analysis that is keen to how power and privilege
play out in our communities. I would like to be connected
to others who are having conversations about education for
social change.”
In order for students in service learning to build a
self-developing movement, they need to know that they are
not starting from scratch.
Ever since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki at the end of World War II growing numbers of
Americans have from all walks of life have begun to
recognize the enormous dangers inherent in giving priority
to technological development over human and community
development. Out of this recognition have come the
anti-nuclear and peace movements of the post-world war II
years.
At the time Einstein said it best. “Technological progress,”
he warned, “is like an axe in the hands of a pathological
criminal.” “The release of atom power has changed
everything but the human mind and thus we drift towards
catastrophe.” “The solution to the problem lies in the heart
of mankind.”
“A human being” Einstein said, “experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest...
a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This
delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our
personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to
us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by
widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
The splitting of the atom also created a great historical
divide in theories and strategies for social change. During
the first half of the 20th century revolutionary struggles had
been dominated by the Marxist-Leninist paradigm in which
consciousness and self-consciousness, ideas and values, are
mere “superstructure.” However, following the creation and
dropping of the atom bomb, human beings could no longer
pretend that everything that happened to us was determined
by external or economic circumstances. Freedom now
included the responsibility for making choices and changing
our own behavior. Radical social change could no longer
be viewed simply in terms of us vs. them, of victims vs.
villains, of good vs. evil or of transferring power from the
top to the bottom. We could no longer afford a separation
between politics and ethics. Radical social change had to be
viewed as a two-sided transformational process, of ourselves
and of our institutions, a process requiring protracted
struggle and not just a D-day replacement of one set of rulers
with another.
The civil rights movement, which was launched by
the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, was the first struggle
by an oppressed people in Western society from this new
philosophical/political perspective. Because American
blacks had developed a new confidence in their humanity as
a result of their “Double V” struggles during World War II,
and also because, pragmatically, violent struggle in the
fascist South would have been suicidal, tens of thousands of
blacks in Montgomery, Ala., were able to carry out a
year-long non-violent, disciplined and, finally, successful
struggle against racism. Before the eyes of the whole world,
a people who had been treated as less than human struggled
against their dehumanization not as angry victims or rebels
but as new men and women, representative of a new more
human society. Using methods, including the creation of
their own system of transportation, that transformed
themselves and increased the good rather than the evil in the
world, always bearing in mind that their goal was not only
desegregating the buses but creating the beloved
community, they inspired the human identity and ecological
movements which over the last forty years have been
creating a new civil society in the United States.
The speeches and writings of Martin Luther King Jr.,
produced in the heat of struggle, played a critical role in the
success of the Montgomery boycott and ensuing civil rights
struggles. Constantly pointing out to activists that their
refusal to respond in kind to the violence and terrorism of
their opponents was increasing their own strength and unity,
constantly reminding them and the world that their goal was
not only the right to sit at the front of the bus or to vote but
to give birth to a new society based on more human values,
King not only empowered those on the frontlines but in the
process developed a new strategy for transforming a struggle
for rights into a struggle that advances the humanity of
everyone in the society and thereby brings the beloved
community closer.
In the last two years of his life, confronted with the
hopelessness of black youth in the Chicago ghetto and the
inhumanity of the Vietnam War, King called for a “radical
revolution in values” as the only way for Americans to
preserve the best in our history. As a black man living in
racist America and as a philosopher, King was supremely
conscious of the contradiction between our technological
overdevelopment and our human underdevelopment. We
have “guided missiles and misguided men,” “he said. “We
must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented society to
a ‘person-oriented’ society,” he warned. “When machines
and computers, profit motives and property rights are
considered more important than people, the giant triplets of
racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.”
King deplored the way that educators were trying to instill
middle class values in black youth,noting that “it was
precisely when young Negroes (sic) threw off their middle
class values and put careers and wealth in a secondary role”
that they made a historic social contribution. Calling for
new programs that would involve young people in
“self-transforming and structure-transforming direct action
in our dying cities,” he also began to project a new kind of
Work that is “done not to secure a living but for its own
sake, to extend knowledge, increase power, enrich literature
and elevate thought.”
“A true revolution of values will look uneasily on the glaring
contrast of poverty and wealth,” he explained. “With
righteous indignation it will look overseas and see individual
capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in
Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out
with no concern for the social betterment of the countries
and say, ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling
that it has everything to teach others and noting to learn
from them is not just.”
In the wake of the civil rights movement, the women’s
movement, especially its EcoFeminist wing, further
deepened our understanding of the fundamental changes that
we now need to make not only in our practice but in our
ways of knowing if we are to grapple seriously with today’s
interlocking economic, ecological and educational crises.
For those of you who are not familiar with Ecofeminism, I’d
like to recommend the work of Starhawk who has been in
the forefront of organizing affinity groups in
anti-globalization struggles, You can look her up at
Starhawk. org. I especially recommend her book Dreaming
the Dark, for the eye-opening appendix entitled “The
Burning Times.” In this little essay Starhawk explains the
witchhunts of the 16th and 17th centuries as the means by
which new professional intellectuals, like Rene Descartes
and Frances Bacon, replaced the intuitive, earth-connected
knowledge of women with Scientific Rationalism, a
mechanistic view of reality as composed of dead, inert,
isolated particles, thus laying the philosophical foundation
for the unlimited technological and economic expansion that
is now creating joblessness, destroying communities, and
devastating our biosphere.
Another very important introduction to EcoFeminism is this
book by Maria Mies, a German sociologist and Vandana
Shiva, the East Indian physicist, philosopher and feminist
who has been active in citizen’s movements against
environmental destruction.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Mies and Shiva explain,
Western philosophers replaced the knowledge, wisdom and
close relationship with Nature practiced by peasants,
women and indigenous peoples with the modern idea that
science and technology are the key to liberation, thus
justifying the exploitation of Nature, women, and
indigenous peoples in order to bring about the rapid
development of the productive forces. It was from this
concept of expanding productivity that Karl Marx derived
his vision of Utopia, a society in which technology has
freed human beings from manual labor and created such
material abundance that each can receive according to
his/her needs and contribute according to his/her abilities.
By contrast, the new society as envisioned by Ecofeminists
is a working society. But instead of resembling the jobs
which people now do mainly for pay, Work in the new
society will be like that which peasants and indigeneous
peoples used to do and women and and artists still do. Even
though it is difficult and physically demanding, this Work
is joyful because it produces use values, nurtures life and
is constantly expanding our humanity.
That is the kind of Work which is now attracting university
students to service learning.
My hope is that in the coming period university
students who are discovering the liberation and
self-transformation that comes from this kind of Work will
be moved to create ways and means for young people in
public schools to experience a similar liberation.and
transformation. The dropout and incarceration rate of
young people in our inner city schools over the last twenty
years, due primarily to schooling that isolates education
from the real life of the community, is a human waste that
no civilized society should tolerate. You can do a lot to turn
this around by struggling to reform teacher education in
your universities and by working with students, teachers
and community groups in the public schools where you
volunteer to introduce community-gardening and other
community-building programs along the lines of Detroit
Summer and Mississippi Freedom Schooling.
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