Citizens Of The United States From The Education School Service Learning Research

Developing effective citizens becomes the world civic education’s core issue with the development of the Times. The United States’civic education has accumulated a wealth of experience in the long-term practice, and the schools’service-learning is an exploration and attempt to develop effective citizens. Service learning is central link in the civic education systems of the United States. The paper discusses the schools’ service-learning and its civic education value, and it has practical significance in development and innovation of our country civic education.It summarizes the connotation of service-learning through setting the meanings of service learning in the first part. Service-learning is independent activities based on students as the center; it is an open study mode with the combination of course learning and community service; it is a process of reflect-service-reflect-learn-reflect; it is a kind of developing education that cultivating students’caring about others and social responsibility. The common of service-learning and modern civic education’ value concept lies in emphasizing rights and responsibilities; cultivating students" social responsibility consciousness and ability to participate. It reveals relationships and functions between service-learning and civic education to show the position in the civic education systems.It focuses on analyzing the civic education goal of the American schools’service-learning in the second part. The United States’democratic society depends on cognitions about own effective citizenships and actions support. So, effective citizens become the foundation of democratic social operation. Based on this, the civic education’s goal of developing effective citizens gradually established. Through the training of the students’service ethics, citizen responsibility and critical reflection, service-learning makes students become the active participated citizens in order to realize civic education’s core target of developing effective citizens.It interprets the specific application of citizen participation which is used in service-learning as a kind of civic education method in the third part. The citizen participation is the most basic method in service-learning practice. It is distinguished from a pure political significance of citizen participation, however, emphasizes the stakeholders’common social participation. The main participation bodies have played different roles in different ways. This part uses the case of "groundwater resources protection" of the university of American Taylor in order to demonstrate how to participate in the service-learning.Finally, through the evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of the American schools’service-learning, it puts forward references and enlightenments about our country’s civic education.