"Dare the school build a new social order?," George Counts (1932) once asked in the title of his call to educational justice-advocacy. "Yes," Benjamin Barber (1999) once responded to a similar question at a service-learning conference, "but not so bluntly." Barber agreed that the service-learning movement, to achieve its oft-stated goals of social improvement, needed to have something of an activist or advocacy edge, but he argued that such a stance could not be pursued too openly nor aggressively, for fear of losing service-learning's institutional support and academic integrity. Edward Zlotkowski (1996) expresses a similar fear that excessive attention to the ideological aims of justice-advocacy and inculcating moral and civic values in youth will harm the ability to institutionalize service-learning among a broad range of faculty, many of whom look to service-learning as a tool to enhancing classroom learning, pure and simple, without associated concerns for "justice-advocacy" or "inculcating civic morality" (especially those in the less political disciplines, such as biology or engineering). Zlotkowski (1996) argues that service-learning advocates spend excessive energy debating whether service-learning should follow a "charity" model, a "citizenship" model, or even a "justice-advocacy" model, and too little energy on how to make service-learning applicable to a wider range of disciplines. "Unless service-learning advocates become far more comfortable seeing 'enhanced learning' as the horse pulling the cart of 'moral and civic values,' and not vice versa," he fears, "service-learning will continue to remain less visible--and less important--to the higher education community than is good for its own survival" (p. 4).
