Philosophical Dualism and the Service Ethic: A Response to Megan Bailey’s “Ritualized Relief and the Misapplication of Dewey in Service-Learning”

Firstly, I want to thank Megan Bailey for maintaining an important critical perspective on an approach to living and learning that I believe can be transformative—but only if we keep a constant critical lens on it: service-learning.1 Service-learning, like many social practices enacted over increasing timespans, has periodically lost its proverbial way; some would argue (and I’m one) that service learning has never been understood well enough theoretically for it to succeed completely in practice—at least not within the institution generally known as “education.” My initial examination of the service-learning pedagogy some twenty-five years ago was precisely the result of a theory/practice disconnect that turned into a Deweyan felt problem connected to several service-learning projects I led at a high school in North Central Florida. Those projects succeeded, but only kind of. And the only reason they succeeded “kind of” was due to a lack of sound theoretical understanding which might reasonably drive its practice. The present manuscript certainly furthers this critical examination in important ways.