Why College? What is Service-Learning?

While Transitions, the orientation program, winds down, I thought it might be good to record some of my remarks from this morning's introduction service-learning and the Service-Learning Center for new students. I tried something new with this approach.

First, what is college for? Why would new students choose Calvin out of the many thousands of available college and university options? And then what is Calvin here for?

My contention, after 25 years of pondering these questions, is that it has something to do with learning to think, to love, and to do. And in so saying, I am defying conventional wisdom, which argues that college is to get people ready for work and citizenship. I say ok, but more. This college finds itself in a tradition that yearns for transformation - for that which is not, to be made right again. And it tries to prepare people to contribute to that "making right" by helping them to think about what they know, what they love, and what they should and can do. Calvin College has a vision for transformation.

Next I suggested that the path from that which is not right, to a transformed reality, one in which things are as they should be, includes three preparatory tracks, all necessary. Around here we often refer to them often in terms like knowledge, skills, and virtues. Our core curriculum is set up around these three core goals, and this is one of the things that sets Calvin apart.

To understand service-learning at Calvin, a little history helps. In 1964, just a few months after a young idealistic president was assassinated in Dallas, two young undergraduates at Calvin, with help from a key professor and a key administrator, formed a new student program called KIDS, Kindling Intellectual Desire in Students, a program aimed at providing tutoring support for children in Grand Rapids' core city schools, while also providing opportunities for Calvin students to experience life outside the often too-protective bubble that makes up college life. The program thrived, and soon became the largest and most successful student organization around the college, and by the 1980s had expanded widely into multiple areas of service-providing, including an emergency moving services, construction and technical support for homeowners, spring break service trips, poverty awareness retreats, big-brother, big-sister mentoring relationships and much more. In the early 1990s, the academic division joined the movement, and soon had incorporated dozens of course assignments designed to actively teach through the pedagogy of service-learning, in partnership with some of the by-now hundreds of local community partners. Which brings us to the present day efforts. We offer multiple opportunities for Calvin students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends to participate in thoughtful, reflective, creative service activity that fits into the reciprocal dynamic suggested by our motto - "Serving to Learn- Learning to Serve."

And to what end? Not simply a detached, triumphalistic, save-the-world end that fulfills a Christian duty but ignores our call to Biblical justice and relationship. But to the ends of a true Christian liberal arts education - Knowledge and learning, Skills and active doing, and Virtue and love. The end of our service-learning is God's shalom, when that which is not, is made right again, and things are as they once were and should be again.