(Washington, DC) We have a pending proposal to create a system that will demonstrate whether students are appropriately prepared to conduct community service. Meanwhile, I am currently teaching a whole course that aims to prepare undergraduates for active citizenship. My class will help design an online module that other students will take before they may participate in civic work in the communities around Tufts University. Students who complete that module will have a kind of “badge” (not necessarily by that name) for community service.

This work is part of a general movement toward “badging” that recently attracted a good summary article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

If I had to summarize the debate with two stylized positions (recognizing, obviously, that many other positions are also possible), here they would be:

In favor: We must find alternatives to the standard model, which is selling students “seat time” and awarding diplomas to people who pass enough tests. That model is too expensive, it alienates too many students, it fails to recognize skills that some students do acquire, and it is poorly designed to teach many important skills. To be sure, students should read and discuss Plato and write analytical or scholarly papers, graded by professors. But most undergraduates do not experience that kind of education now. And in any case, we should also teach other things, such how to work in community organizations, and allow students to demonstrate competency in those areas. Further, we must recognize that schools and colleges are not the only educators. Instead of piling more responsibilities onto students and schools (and adding new ways for them to fail), we should create opportunities for a whole range of institutions to educate and to recognize individuals’ skills.

Against: Education is “holistic” in that it’s not just the aggregate of discrete courses or other educational experiences. An entire curriculum should have a shape, so that the whole is greater than its parts. Likewise, education should combine academic work with membership in a learning community; skills with knowledge and values; theory with application and critical reflection; individual work with collaboration. One of our problems is that we try to sell education in chunks, one credit at a time, to a public that mistakes it for a divisible good. A four-year degree earned at a single residential college is the ideal, because it is coherent. Badging just contributes to the false idea that education is modular, skill-oriented, and portable.

I see both sides, but I believe we have a desperate need to experiment with alternatives, even if they present dangers, because we are very far from being able to offer a satisfactory education for most American students.