Mohandas Gandhi's moral wisdom, "The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others," is a variation on a theme which finds expression across many cultures and religions.  It is also a paradoxical wisdom which might inform the moral education of students in the public and private school systems including in regard to community service programs.  Though fairly ubiquitous in secondary schools these programs tend to fail the grade in terms of vision and scope, as well as priority and organization.

The quality of community service programs vary widely from the mandatory to the episodic, from individual to group projects to what actually constitutes a service project.  While most programs are well meaning, the majority lack sufficient oversight and a service-learning component.  While just about everyone in the education field lauds service programs in our schools, most are poorly designed and in need of clearer guidelines and more vigorous support from education leaders and related stakeholders.

Even as the country seeks to boost literacy, there is an ethical literacy about citizenship and civic responsibility that should also be taught in the form of community service-learning.  The service component is about action and the learning component concerns preparation for and ongoing reflection coincident with and after engaging in service.

There is a virtuous cycle and service model here as recent as modern experiential learning theories and as old as the advice of an ancient thinker and teacher.  Aristotle taught and wrote that virtue may begin as a habit and then become an innate part of one's disposition.
Modern science from sociobiology to ethology and related disciplines have also provided insight into the substrates and contours of moral development.  In his recent book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, New York Times columnist David Brooks offers a fascinating read into the biological basis of human altruism.
 
PRACTICE
Like learning to play a musical instrument, one learns by practice, by listening to great musicians and not primarily by reading a book or listening to a lecturer expound on how to play.  Aristotle reminds: "We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts."

We become community servants by acting.  The formation of this habit of good citizenship is the provenance of the family, the church and civil society as well as schools.
The failure of socializing our young people in terms of civility and moral education is largely the failure of adults.  It is a failure of example and imagination.  Too often, we have not been good community servants.  We have not seized the imaginations of our youth in terms of finding oneself through the call, the adventure and the joy of service as well as its challenges and even heartbreaks.

We have often taught our young people the opposite: to be selfish and self-absorbed and to seek happiness in the accumulation of things.  We have not so much taught them to be moral agents as much as, by example and word, we have taught them to be avid materialists.
This is one reason for the culture of criminality which fuels everything from petty crime to defrauding government whether as taxpayers or public employees.

Since the launch of community service programs in the public, denominational and other private schools some years ago, there is a new and more urgent emphasis on such programs.  This is inspired by various reasons including the need for measures to prevent or stem criminal and anti-social behavior among young people.

But a larger purpose is a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of national service which is not limited to programs for at-risk-youth.  Well structured community service-learning programs in our public school system constitute a significant form of national service.
The merging tributaries to make more uniform and transform community service programs in public schools as more effective agents of moral education and social renewal include voices from the prime minister to groups such as We the People.

As noted in last week's Front Porch, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham noted in his 2011/2012 Budget Contribution his Government's commitment to "Community service programs in all public schools with an enhanced service-learning, ethics and character development component."

We the People has expressed its commitment to community renewal.  There is now an extraordinary opportunity for civic groups like the organization to collaborate with the Ministry of Education to dramatically restructure community service programs in the public school system with carefully designed learning, ethics and character development components.
All of this may include assisting the Ministry with some of the costs associated with redesigning existing programs that are indigenous and effective.  There will be a need for the training of service coordinators within schools and the development of service placements and opportunities.

The great dream of national service is within our reach with the promise of the vast majority of students rendering quality community service in what may become a community service revolution.  This not only constitutes these young people -- in a novel way and echoing Gandhi -- becoming the change we want to see.  

It is also change we can all believe in as our young people may yet help to emancipate the wider community from the mental slavery of civic apathy and as noted last week, from the cul-de-sacs of self-absorption and gated communities of frenzied materialism.

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