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Shuran Yang

About Shuran Yang

http://www.colby.edu/directory_cs/syang23/

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Community Service: The Moon and Sixpence

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In “The Moon and Sixpence” by William Maugham, the author portrayed a man who gave up his “sixpence” (having a realistic, wealthy life) and chased his “moon” (the unrealistic dream of being a painter). Building off of Maugham’s metaphor, I like to use the moon and the sixpence to help differentiate between the types of community service. For me, the sixpence-style community service refers to the activity that provides physical or material support, such as donation and building infrastructures. By contrast, the moon-style community service refers to activities that usually involves greater spiritual engagement and relationship building, such as mentorship and companionship for people in need. Being educated in an elite high school that practices global citizenship education, I participated in different community services that fulfilled our school’s curricular requirement and, simultaneously, benefitted my college application. When I read the interviews with students and alumni from an elite high school in Ghana, I noticed that community service also took a significant position in students’ life.

Because the school practices the IB system, community service is mandatory to fulfill its CAS (creativity, activity, service) requirements to get a diploma. Students engage in both types of community service. The sixpence-style community service includes:

  1. Mapping out the surrounding areas of their school on Google Map
  2. Building a school
  3. Providing computers for a school
  4. Book donation and building a book database for a specialized school
  5. Fundraising for clean water supply and sustainable growth

Students also participate in many moon-style community services:

  1. Playing with kids in a specialized school for the blind and deaf
  2. Teaching in a local primary school for two hours every week
  3. Helping nursing mother and kids
  4. NGO that facilitates disabled people

The interviews revealed that CAS allows these students to choose community service based on their interests, and the services usually target local areas and local communities. This automatically reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about habitus. Habitus refers to the habits, skills, and dispositions that are so deeply ingrained in us due to our life experiences, and we use them to perceive, navigate, react to the world. For example, due to the difference in class, students in this elite school might possess a distinct type of habitus that is different from that of students in another local public school. According to Bourdieu, habitus facilitates our navigation of similar social environments but undermines our navigation of social environments that are too different. In this case, Ghanaian students in our study might be more comfortable and successful when traveling to another elite high school than visiting a underdeveloped school. 

https://images.app.goo.gl/7feJXHAhWRtBFP4y5

Based on the idea of habitus, the process of community service can’t be smooth because of the inevitable conflict of habitus between students from an elite background and the people being helped. I believe that this conflict is less severe in sixpence-style community service than in moon-style community service, and sixpence-style community service makes the service more efficient and contributes more actual help. Because the needs are usually obvious and physical in sixpence-style community service, elite students take the main role in the service, and there are fewer requirements about the interaction between habitus. For instance, a local school facing a shortage of books has an obvious need. Without frequent visits to the school or interaction with its students, elite students can simply solve the problem by collecting and donating books. The return of their service will be efficient because students can easily understand and provide the exact support wanted by people in need. By contrast, the needs in moon-style service are usually less obvious and more spiritual, which requires deep involvement and frequent interaction between habitus. Consider teaching in a primary school located in an underdeveloped area that has students from a different SES status. Being raised in distinct educational backgrounds, elite students might struggle with teaching unfamiliar materials. They might also have trouble communicating and interacting with their students because there is a huge mismatch between their beliefs, perceptions, manners… These will result in a less efficient return of the service than elite students originally wished because people’s needs can’t be properly investigated and facilitated. 

The conflict of habitus urges us to question community service in elite education. In its essence, is community service a performance to show one’s eliteness and a bonus for the college application? Do targeted communities actually receive help from community service? How can we measure the outcome of community service to improve the quality of service? Should students participate in sixpence-style service more because the outcome is more “real” and efficient? Is there any training that fully prepares elite students before entering a service? More questions should be asked to examine elite community service in the future. 

Learning Language in Education: Communication or Domination? 

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When I watched the videos of student interviews in Ghana, I was shocked by students’ English fluency. In Professor Howard’s research about elite schools on different continents, English is the only language taught by most elite schools. Besides, our readings about the schooling systems in different countries also show that English is the dominant second language taught in some non-English speaking countries. I would like to discuss the two roles of English and language education in general: communication and domination.

Because English has become the leading lingua franca globally, one of its important roles is to facilitate communication between groups of different backgrounds. When considering the four main goals of education, I found that English education in a non-English speaking country would fulfill all the goals: political, economic, social, and cultural. Politically, a country with more people proficient in English will gain more chances of engaging in the global discussion of political issues because English dominates the international discourse. As different regions of the world are increasingly connected by global trade, English proficiency helps the communication of business ideas and supports the efficiency of global trade. With the increasing migration of people across the world and the development of information and communication technology, people can easily meet people of various backgrounds and encounter different cultures online. English helps in socializing with different individuals and learning/sharing cultures globally. In a word, English is essential for the survival and engagement of countries in globalization, especially for non-English speaking countries.

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Lots of questions arose when I thought about English as the leading language for communication. Why English? Why not Spanish or Mandarin? Will people in English-speaking countries use the second languages they learned in school? Or will they forget because English is the dominant language and most comfortable for them? Why not create a new language (e.g., Esperanto) that does not represent a specific ideology or power for the world? In my opinion, English education is also a representation of domination. Historically, colonization spread the popularity of English. Politically and economically, the portion of the world that has the most power and control speaks English. For the rest of the world, people are experiencing social and cultural westernization, not globalization. While some people thrive to connect to the world using English, other native speakers are lazy or even unaware of exploring the world outside their English bubble. My cousin studied in an elite international primary school in Beijing. While learning and speaking entirely in English in school, he must use Chinese in daily life. However, merely receiving an English education made him lose touch with Chinese society and culture. He easily became an American after immigration without any culture shock, and his transition to US school life was smooth. It strongly convinced me that English is more than just communication but implicit domination of dominated ideology and power. 

Language domination also happens in more local contexts, even outside of English education. In my community service for the left-behind children of the Dong ethnic group in a Chinese village, we assisted their Mandarin literacy (and also English) so that they could survive in the fierce education system and end their poverty and loneliness through successful academic performance. However, fewer children can speak the Dong language now, and Dong tradition might only appear in museum exhibitions one day. Combining with my own experience of learning English mandatorily as a second language, I know deeply about how powerful the education of the dominant language can penetrate, change, and even reshape a local world.

While learning languages is essential for communication, language education can also be a form of domination that prevents real communication from happening across a broader range. The education of the dominant language, especially English, will be an interesting angle to study globalization vs westernization, global citizenship education vs “western” elite schooling, and power in general.