ABSTRACT
AmeriCorps and other service initiatives, such as Campus Compact, may well hold the potential to help revitalize the concept and practice of public work, as well as to make service-learning explicitly contribute to the education of citizens. Three main conceptions have arisen in the history, each tied to a distinctive conception of service. Each of these conceptions may be thought of as an “ideal type”, picking out but refining, stylizing, and generalizing certain particular features of the real world of citizenship. A conception of service-learning follows almost seamlessly from this conception of citizenship. Indeed, the contemporary service-learning movement, if it can properly be called a movement, has, it would appear, a made-to-order ally in communitarianism. Students and young people learn about citizenship, as well as about themselves, when they serve others in the community. Thus, service-learning, its communitarian advocates claim, prepares an otherwise self-centered generation for citizenship.
