Favorite Change - Add Community Service

#1.  What I would change: Add Community Service
In Gatto's "Against School", he explained how "mass schooling of a compulsory nature" "got its teeth into the United States", he goes on to say that there was a threefold purpose: "1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best".   Community service is a way to help students "get out of the box" and become part of our community and world.

#2. Who is the audience:  Educators

#3. What are their beliefs/values/interests regarding eduction?
Many teachers do what Freire said is "The Banking Concept of Education" with the "following attitudes and practices":

• "The teacher teaches and the students are taught
• The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
• The teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
• The teacher talks and the students listen-meekly;
• The teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;"
• and more.....

He goes on to say that the " banking concept of education regards men as adaptable manageable beings, The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they de velop the critical consciousness that would result from their intervention in the world."

#4.  What will our system gain or loose?
When students learn to be part of the world in a real sense, they are becoming "giving, sharing, caring, workers together" in our community and world.

#5. Reasons they should agree with me?

• Because it would make good people
• Because it would make good citizens
• Because it would make each student become their best

#6. Reasons they m;ight not agree with me?

• No, because there would not be enough time
• No, because it would cost too much money
• No, because community service is the parents responsibility

#7. Answers to their objections.

• Adding a community service program would take extra time, but if you add 10 minutes per class at the end of a regular course of study, the time invested would be minimal.
• It may cost some money, but the investment would eventually be "put back into the community"
• Community service, from my experience, has been the parents responsibility, or the criminal justice system, or a fund raising event, but if it was part of the educational system, we would all be working together for the world to become a better place.

#8. My support for these reasons are:
Still working on.  :)