I found this article to be very interesting because it tackles the notion of the importance of a student-centered institution. In this article, Wexler mentions points from Randy Stoecker’s Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement, such as what classrooms really do, as in their real purpose, and how charity is seen as disrespectful. He makes the analogy between firefighters and service learning programs by saying “the firefighters would fight fires only for set hours. If your fire lasted longer, you would just have to try to put out the rest of it yourself.” He says this because he wants to show how service-learning programs have become something so decreasingly available, and that that is not how it’s supposed to be. He believes that more students should be involved in service learning programs, and should not be solely focused on school. He says, “Classrooms are for students to make mistakes. Communities are not places to make mistakes.” This is what he means by “what the classrooms really do.” He then talks about charity at the end of his book and how it’s seen as disrespectful because it categorizes people as needy rather than people who are suffering from an unjust system. He believes that this is why colleges focus on uncontroversial causes and why they don’t do activist work. Again, this is why he argues for students to be more involved in service learning programs, because they help their community and become involved in activist work that will help them learn to encounter opposition. I believe Stoecker is right to a degree. From this article, I’m convinced that students should have some involvement in service learning programs to help their communities, but I also believe that school should still be the center of a student’s life. They can help their community, but they also should focus on their education.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/16/new-book-argues-service-learning-doesn%E2%80%99t-prioritize-students
