Varlotta
elitism (Barber, 1992). Thus, it is essentially anticommunal (Palmer, 1990); not everyone is equally
educable for the elite discourse that emerges from
its "pure knowledge" (Barber, on Bloom, p. 185).
Because many are not suited for membership in
academic community, only "committed truth seekers are to be admitted" (Bloom, 1987, p. 381). The
responsibilities of these educated and intelligent
few is not to inundate the "ordinary mortals" with
books they cannot understand or with "fearsome
truths" they cannot comprehend (Barber, on
Bloom, p. 174), but to produce "inoculating halftruths" to sustain the masses (Barber, on Bloom,
1992, p. 174). By filtering truths, bestowing
knowledge, transforming people into objects, and
insulating themselves from their surrounding communities, the privileged members of the closed
community have converted education into a "practice of domination" (Freire, 1970, p. 62).
A Response to Objectivism's Closed
Educational Communities
Democratic progressive educators reject both the
modem view that describes community as "a consensual entity created by an interrelated and identifiably bordered group" (Quantz, 1988) and the
structuralist view of knowledge that promises
order, efficiency and control (Cherryholmes, in
Moore, 1990). Put even more strongly, democratic progressives should work to explode traditional
definitions of knowledge and community that
"encourage and justify oppression, violence, and
political imperialism" (Child, Williams & Birch,
1995, p. 167). But, rupturing the traditional definitions of knowledge and community does not
necessitate the abandonment of either concept. As
Benjamin Barber reminds us, because "hyperskepticism is philosophically problematic... [and] politically and pedagogically disastrous," (1992, p. 121)
democratic progressive educators should forge a
middle ground where well-taught students can
position themselves somewhere between Absolute
Certainty and Permanent Doubt (1992, p. 124).
According to Barber, this middle ground is the
point of balance that makes a democratic community possible (1992, p. 124).
After describing and denouncing the kind of
community that may be constructed and maintained by "modem" (as opposed to postmodern)
epistemologies, I think it is important to reiterate
two questions that underpin the purpose of this
paper: 1) what kind of community is likely to be
born out of an epistemology that is positioned as
the "middle ground" of the modern/postmodern
spectrum? 2) what kind of philosophy-pedagogyprogram can move us toward and sustain that kind
of community? One type of community that is
likely to arise is the democratic progressive one,
and service-learning is a transformative agent that
will nurture its growth.
Alternative Epistemologies and the
Democratic Progressive Community
The democratic progressive community and its
relational, experiential, and constructivist epistemologies expand the learning and knowing of the
closed community by offering its members the
opportunities to 1) participate in reciprocal teaching/learning experiences with members of the larger community (relational); 2) test and challenge
their recently digested knowledges against personal experiences outside the academy (experiential);
and 3) engage in activities where new knowledges
are continuously constructed to produce the "common good" (constructivism) (Raskin, 1986, p. 8).
Hence, neither knowledge nor the common good is
abstracted from concrete and static realities;
instead, both are part of a communal experience,
produced and projected by contextualized social
interactions.
While several academic movements incorporate
these alternative epistemologies into their curricula, foremost is feminism (Palmer, 1990). Building
upon a type of feminist epistemology, one of care
(Noddings, 1984 & 1988), service-learning advocates may move beyond the "cold, abstract madness of 'objective reality'" (Raskin, 1986, p. 118)
to the "relational nature of reality" (Palmer, p.
110). Because the epistemology of care is tied to
the experience, deliberation, inquiry, and situatedness of all those involved in the situation, it is not
a "self-righteous moralizing" attempt to illuminate
and impose the predetermined values of a community (Noddings, 1988, pp. 172-173). When relational epistemologies are combined with experiential or constructivist epistemologies, students, faculty, and community-members-at-large can construct and communicate knowledges to, between,
and among numerous constituencies (Wagner,
1990).
Thus, by utilizing these epistemologies, educators can transform the closed community, with its
ascribed members, internally prescribed values,
and persistent truths (Moore, 1990), to a more
democratic progressive one that reaches beyond
the university -across class, race, gender, ethnicity,
and sexual orientation - to reinterpret knowledge as
something that is connected to both the structures
of inequalities and the attempts to overcome them
(Apple,.1993). The borders of the democratic progressive community are mutable. It is a "community at loose ends" which neither confines nor
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