Education and Social Action

Community Service and the Curriculum in Higher Education

Sinclair Goodlad

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138344341
• eBook ISBN: 9780429797385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1975 Education and Social Action, examines the possibility and value of effecting links between community service and the curriculum in various sectors of higher education. It describes what has been done in each of several disciplines in giving students the opportunity to carry out work of direct social utility within the context of the curriculum. It examines the benefits and the problems experienced by students, their teachers, and analyses the social and educational issues involved. The book derives links between the work of Community Service Volunteer in fostering links between Community Service and the curriculum, not only in schools but in institutions of higher education.

Chapter One

Student, College and Community

BY JOHN CARTLEDGE

John Cartledge teaches at Edgware School. Since graduating in Geography at Cambridge University, he has taken a Certificate of Education and been Secretary to the Cambridge University Graduate Society, spent a year as Director of the London Organisation for Student Community Action and served on the permanent staff of Community Service Volunteers. He is a member of the new Hertfordshire County Council.

‘The only way to know conditions is to make social investigations, to investigate the social conditions of each class in real life. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice. Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that. When in addition to reading some Marxist books our intellectuals have gained some understanding through close contact with the masses of peasants and workers and through their own practical work, we will all be speaking the same language.’¹

‘The universities are increasingly aware that they cannot survive in a society which does not resolve its festering injustices. An education is not complete unless it includes an awareness of contemporary social problems. To be a positive force for positive change-to help break the barriers – student volunteers must approach their tasks with open eyes and open minds. Every institution or organisation in society is involved in supporting or altering the status quo, and students must be aware of which ones share their own aims and motives most fully. They must also have a clear understanding of what they hope will be achieved in the realm of social change.’²

A belief in the possibility and desirability of close practical links between the higher education system and movements for social change is a worldwide phenomenon, transcending differences of political ideology and social structure. The first quotation above is taken from the Thoughts of Chairman Mao-Tse Tung, the second from a manual published by the US Government Printing Office, but the coincidence of view is remarkable. More remarkable still, in view of the global extent of this connection, is the apparent ease with which British universities and colleges have stood aside from this trend, and the insignificance of the organised student movement as a social force outside the narrow limits of its immediate institutional environment. British academics have never displayed any active concern for the needs of ‘the community’, or their relationship with it – except insofar as the term is used in a general way to denote society at large. The idyllic vision of a ‘community of scholars’ has inescapable overtones of introversion and introspection, a withdrawal from the hurly-burly of real-life conflicts and pressures into the sheltered, quasi-monastic calm of the academic ivory tower. The history of universities’ dealings with the state has been one of a long and largely successful struggle to preserve freedom of thought and study from ‘improper’ pressure and direction from elsewhere, and, despite their near total reliance upon public funds for all purposes, the universities still continue strenuously to resist any but the most general directions from official quarters regarding their purposes and work.

And if central government has been kept at arm’s length, local government has been kept almost wholly out of sight. An elderly alderman or two can generally be found amongst the ranks of the (purely ceremonial) court of governors with perhaps an industrialist and a (usually retired) trade unionist thrown in for good measure. But even this token connection is of comparatively recent origin. It is interesting to note that until now the symbolic connection has been reversed in the two oldest English universities, with oligarchic committees of college bursars appointing eight of their number to serve on the respective city councils. Certainly, any suggestion that the local community might have some prior claim upon the universities’ time and resources would be vigorously denied. The recent suggestion of both Labour and Conservative Education Ministers that English universities might move closer to the Scottish (or French) pattern of regionalised intake and a substantial proportion of home-based students was greeted with a unanimous outburst of vice-chancellorial hostility. And the new generation of technological universities differs little. The former CATs were distinguished by the speed with which-upon receipt of their royal charters and consequent elevation to true university status – they jettisoned their sub-degree level and vocational courses, and hence their curricular orientation to the needs of their host communities. And notwithstanding the claims of their dwindling army of protagonists and their different administrative structures, precisely the same traits are now being exhibited by the great majority of polytechnics. Only at Bath and Loughborough universities have there been signs of a possible reversal in this trend, with the setting up of limited liability trading companies to advertise the availability of university research facilities to local industry. But since the object of these enterprises is simply to make available their intellectual plus physical resources to the highest commercial bidder, far from their being signs of incipient ‘community relatedness’ in the sense advocated by radical critics of academic monasticism, they are merely the most conspicuous symbols of some universities’ readiness to prostitute themselves to the needs and wishes of corporate capitalism – an intellectual servitude which was dramatically exemplified by the revelation of the relationship between the administrations of Warwick University and Chrysler (United Kingdom) in 1970.³ In short, the present situation is one in which, though institutions of higher education dot the landscape on all sides, such connection as they may have with the local community which surrounds them is purely symbolic and peripheral. In both their academic and social policies (social here implying such matters as student housing arrangements, recreational provision, wage policies for non-academic employees and the like) they are, at best, indifferent to local needs and views and, at worst, quite as insensitive and hostile as major industrial enterprises, property companies or similarly powerful and non-accountable social institutions.

It is interesting, in passing, to compare this situation with that in the United States, since, notwithstanding Britain’s recent conspicuously unenthusiastic lurch into (Western) Europe, it seems likely that the US will continue for some time to be our largest single source of intellectual stimulus and area of academic intercourse (if only by default because the academic structures of most EEC countries are yet more elitist and socially unaccountable than our own). It is, of course, difficult to generalise about the nature and character of higher education in a system as gigantic and variegated as the American, and it undoubtedly includes a number of institutions where overt evidence of concern with questions of social responsibility is as lacking as in Britain. But it is true to say that at the administrative level the ‘Vice-President for Community Affairs’ – or some comparable post – has in the last decade become a common feature of many campuses, and in a number of cases the process has been carried much further. At Wayne State University in downtown Detroit, for example, the entire curriculum has been reoriented towards the needs of the ghetto community in which it is located. The City University of New York, with its adoption of a complete open-admissions policy, has now entered the field of mass community education on a grand scale, while Harvard’s much publicised controversy over the impact of its expansion plans on the low-income residents of surrounding neighbourhoods has been paralleled by comparable conflicts in many other institutions. In the case of Columbia, the competing claims of the university for building land and of Harlem residents for recreational open space led to open confrontation and the temporary paralysis of the institution.

Welcome though these developments are in their own right, it is arguable whether they would have occurred had they not been preceded by the tide of student revolt which swept across the campuses in the late 1960s. The revolts themselves were short-lived, and their single most important cause-mass conscription for the US forces in Vietnam – has been removed, but the mark they have left is indelible, and the heightened social awareness of both faculty and students is a part of their enduring legacy. Many US colleges, at any rate those operated under public auspices, have always had an element of community orientation in their character, deriving from the limited geographical area from which a majority of their students are drawn and the local origin of their administration and finance. But this relationship has been dramatically reinforced by the welter of practical student community action programmes which have flourished in the aftermath of the strikes, sit-ins and protests of recent years. According to the National Student Volunteer Program (NSVP) headquarters in Washington, a recent Gallup poll showed that approximately 400,000 students on 1,700 campuses are now regularly involved in some form of voluntary social action.⁴ The range recorded is enormous – from free breakfasts for slum kids to law-for-laymen seminars, from drug hotlines to ‘adopt-a-grandparent’ schemes, from job scouts for ex-prisoners to ‘project price watch’, from food co-operatives to eco-action squads – and so too is the extent to which they are concerned with promoting measurable social change, as opposed to mere short-term relief. But the promotion of change is not regarded as a sinister political aberration (as the extract from an NSVP manifesto at the head of this chapter revealed) and the favour with which such activities are regarded by academic authorities can be measured in their response to NSVP’s most recent experiment, the University Year for Action. This is a scheme whereby students are permitted to take a year off from their normal courses to work as full-time volunteers in social action projects, yet still receive full academic credit. In its pilot stage, UYA had already enrolled 1,000 students from twenty-four colleges, in all parts of the country, and the enthusiastic response of its first batch of recruits seemed certain to guarantee it an expanded role in the future.⁵

Clearly, the sheer size of the United States, and the flexibility of its colleges’ academic crediting arrangements, make an operation of this style and scope far easier to mount than in Britain. But practical considerations of this kind are only a partial explanation of British universities’ total failure – so far – to show any but the most token interest in student community action ventures. Equally important, it must be admitted, are their tradition-bound limits to the proper scope of academic activity, their largely theoretical curricula, and their general unconcern for students’ extra-mural and extra-curricular activities. The call for student union autonomy – in itself desirable – has been misinterpreted as an argument for a total separation between in-class and out-of-class activities, with the inevitable result that the claims of student community activists for a share of universities’ formal teaching time and curricular resources have been largely ignored. A survey of heads of departments conducted at the Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1972 revealed starkly the degree to which they were indifferent (if not actually hostile) to the proposition that, in as dramatic a situation of social unrest as that which prevails in Northern Ireland, the University might be neglecting its responsibilities to the wider community by failing to seek ways in which it could contribute directly to the resolution of some of the underlying social conflicts.⁶ It is clear from their replies that conventionally assessed criteria of ‘academic merit’ were the chief preoccupation of this particular cross-section of academics and there is no reason to believe that their counterparts elsewhere are very different. Only such vocationally-oriented disciplines as law, medicine and architecture laid claim to any significant degree of community-relatedness in their curricula – and none of these did so in the specific context of the immediate needs of the local community.

It would be quite wrong to imply from all this, however, that social concern of any kind is wholly alien to the British academic tradition. Rather, it has been relegated to a well-established but essentially peripheral backwater, from which it is extremely difficult to restore it to the mainstream of university life and thought. The university-sponsored ‘settlements’ (located, as a rule, far from the institutions which spawned them) still survive as independent social work agencies in East London, Liverpool, Birmingham and elsewhere and most still receive a measure of financial support from their parent bodies, though the breed of earnest undergraduates of half a century ago, who helped to run their scout troops and their old folks’ treats, has, for the most part, disappeared. The time-honoured tradition of the rag is now also in decline – partly because of public hostility to students in general, but partly too because of diminished student interest in fund raising activities of a kind in which the efforts of the participants are only very distantly and ephemerally related to the chosen causes. Charitable fund raising, however enjoyable the techniques employed may be in themselves, appears very much a second best to students who seek a more direct and personal engagement in tackling social needs of every kind. And in many places open conflicts have arisen where students have sought to change the list of beneficiaries, since the local authorities which licence street collections have from time to time vetoed the omission of a well known national charity such as the Haig Fund in favour of causes closer to the students’ own experience or interests. In such situations, the usual consequence has been the abandonment of the rag and the diversion of the student energies into work on behalf of the group (for example, an advice centre for young people with drug problems, or gypsy support group, to take two recent examples) to which exception has been taken by the licensing authority. Though firm evidence is hard to come by, it seems likely that a comparable decline in support has affected the work-camps which once attracted large numbers of young people from different countries to live and work together on some common task (generally of a constructional character) during their vacations. The reasons for this are less easy to explain, but one might hazard a guess that as international travel has ceased to be a privilege of an affluent elite and hitchhiking across continents becomes almost commonplace, it is no longer necessary for young people to seek the organised and structured system of the work-camp in order to meet their peers from other countries and to see the world.

But as these patterns of activity have declined, so new manifestations of students’ social concern have arisen to take their place. ‘Student community action’ is a fairly recent addition to the jargon of educational debate, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s its protagonists have established themselves as a significant element within the British student movement. To some extent, it is an outgrowth of the older traditions of social service already described, but whereas they were almost invariably religious rather than political in inspiration, the present generation of student community activists have tended to express their aims in unreservedly political terms, and to affect a style of activity and argument far more closely related to that of the contemporary generation of radical student leaders. Indeed, the growth of SCA can be shown to be directly in the mainstream of student militancy, insofar as once the immediate grievances over the more trivial restrictions on students’ life styles had been resolved, and a measure of participation in university and college government secured (albeit generally only in the marginal areas of decision making), it was not unnatural that students’ attention should turn to the relationship between their institutions and the wider society of which they are a part. Those students who are alienated from a society devoted very largely to the pursuit of purely materialist aims, organised on a competitive and individualistic basis, yet increasingly indifferent to fundamental problems of civil liberties and intolerant of non-conforming and culturally independent minorities – these students have naturally been foremost amongst the critics of institutions which, while purporting to protect the fundamental values of freedom in thought, research, speech and writing, appear, in practice, to have become little more than the agencies of the corporate capitalist state, processing a carefully selected elite to occupy positions of power and profit in society tomorrow. Assertions of this kind, declaimed before student audiences to thunderous applause, are characterised as a rule by remarkable woolliness of thought – and it is fair to question how far their advocates can, in practice, claim to speak for the generality of students, since they themselves are apt to make frequent reference to the need to raise the ‘level of consciousness’ of their peers. But it cannot be gainsaid that a serious debate about the total social role of the higher education system is taking place today within the leadership of the organised student movement, quite distinct from its day-to-day concern with grants, accommodation, social facilities, admissions procedures and the like – and that central to this debate is a widespread conviction that, by some means, student radicals must make common cause with other forces of dissent and movements for change within society.

The ephemerality of the student experience and the generally limited day-to-day contact of students with groups outside the formal system of higher education are major obstacles to the forging of effective and enduring links – coupled with a not unnatural scepticism, on the part of many ‘grass root’ community groups, towards the students’ real intentions. It is not difficult for intelligent, articulate, socially-conscious students to perceive in the sudden flourishing of tenants’ associations, claimants unions, free schools, pre-school playgroups, neighbourhood councils, community newspapers and the like, a striking upswell of political activity within the community wholly outside the conventional and now discredited partisan framework – and to seek to identify with it. But it is sometimes more difficult for the members of such groups to see in students (who may appear, at least superficially, to be in some respects a privileged stratum within society) their natural allies, not least because of students’ often limited acquaintance with and understanding of the communities within and alongside which they seek to work. And such reservations about the intentions or, indeed, the worth of students as allies in such campaigns tend to be reinforced by the frequent failure of students to fulfil the commitments they have entered into. There are innumerable examples of instances where students (with the best of intentions) have accepted leadership roles in local groups, only to disappear on vacation for five months or more each year, leaving the group in a situation worse than that which would have obtained had they not intervened in the first place. In his account of the Liverpool Educational Priority Area Project, for example, Eric Midwinter has much to say in favour of the student teachers who-in this case, unusually, under the guidance and with the support of their colleges – took part in the programme of experimental curricular innovations which the Project was set up to promote. But he makes no attempt to conceal his frustration and annoyance at the self-selected student group which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Community Service and the Curriculum in Higher Education
• 1 Student, College and Community
• 2 Student Help for the Educationally Disadvantaged
• 3 The Student of Literature and the Needs of Children
• 4 Law Students and Community Action
• 5 Community Service and Community Planning-Whose Ideals?
• 6 Community-related Project Work in Engineering
• 7 Fieldwork in Theological Education
• 8 A Sandwich Course in Sociology
• 9 Summer Projects for Children with Language Difficulties
• 10 Community Action in Liberal Studies
• Index