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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. 

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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. 

Homogeneity – What the data was telling us all along

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When I wrote my last blog post, my research group had yet to conduct an interview with our assigned student at the Croft School. At that point, we wanted to focus our research on extracurricular activities.

However, after analyzing the transcripts for our 3 interviews, I noticed a common theme running through the data: homogeneity.  To support my analysis of the Croft School in this post, I include relevant questions and responses from our interviews in bold below.

According to the Croft School student we interviewed, most students at the school come from similar backgrounds.  Croft School students often come from families that encourage and expect them to attend university.  Since this school does not offer financial aid or scholarships, all students at this school come from families that can afford the school’s tuition—in other words, from a high socioeconomic class.

Interviewer: So does the Croft offer scholarships to students who can’t pay the full tuition?

Student: No.

This doesn't exist at the Chilean School!
This doesn’t exist at the Croft School!

Since Chile is so economically and socially inequitable, it is not surprising that Croft School students like our interviewee live in areas concentrated with upper-class families, and rarely interact with lower class people.

I: No scholarships? Oh. And then where you live in Santiago, did you grow up exposed to people of different social classes, or do most people who live in the area are from the same social class?

S: All from a similar social class.

I: How often do you interact with people who are not in your group?

S: Not often.

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Yup, that looks pretty unequal to me!

Since a majority of students attending the Croft School come from similar backgrounds/social classes, it appears they also share a habitus. Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as a system of embodied dispositions that organize the way individuals perceive and react to the world around them. These mental habits, schemes of perception, classification, appreciation, feelings, and actions are shaped by social interactions and personal histories. As a result, different groups (such as a social class) share a habitus.

While students appear to share a habitus before they enter the Croft School, the headmaster’s message and our interviews indicate that the school also teaches an institutional habitus. Institutional habitus is the impact an organization, such as the education system, has on an individual’s behavior. This organization typically reflects the values of a particular cultural group or social class. In this case, the Croft School reflects upper class values.

The Croft School’s curriculum is organized to prepare students for university, and reinforces the expectation that they will attend.  The school encourages students to pursue certain high-paying careers (including engineering, law, medicine, economics, and architecture) after attending university.  Through an “all-rounder”, holistic education, students are taught the school’s values—the spirit of service, good manners, and fair play. While not explicitly a Croft School value, our research also indicates that the school encourages competition.

According to our interviewee, the Croft way of thinking is synonymous with the Croft values.

I: Many of the Croft thinking is based on competition with others. Like because one of the key elements of school is like sports, sports you have competition. Like I want to get to the first team, things like that. Ummm that’s reflected on like almost every aspect of the Croft, like in aspects where there should be no competition

I: Yes. And that is like the main aspect of the Croft kind of thinking, competition.

Our interviewee also told us that students are rewarded for sharing the same views as their teachers.

I: … There is like discussion groups in my school that are called colloquials, and there is this teacher that organizes it… she like chooses like who has to go… she chooses the students that are friends with her.

I: … Its not popularity… its about thinking the same as the teacher.

Since the Croft School strongly encourages its students to adopt a particular way of thinking, Bourdieu would argue that this school (like most elite schools) acts as a miniature, closed off society that shares a single lifestyle—one that is reflected in the shared goals, opinions, and values of its students.

If you do not share the same habitus as us, you shall not enter!
If you do not share the same habitus as us, you shall not enter!

Elite schools like the Croft School attempt to select, and develop within students, a specific habitus. Ultimately, homogenous groups lead to cultural insulation, and reinforce the dispositions and values shared by all classmates.  This environment allows the Croft School to produce graduates that will have the necessary capital to join the elite social class.

Citations:

Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1996. Print

Thomas, Liz.  “Student retention in higher education: the role of institutional habitus.”  J. Education Policy,vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 423-442, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.476.2444&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Accessed 16 Nov. 2016.