Disciplines in the humanities have been slow to adopt service-learning and public-engaged scholarship overall, and scholars opposed to it often refer to the private goals of higher education, including private contemplation shielded from market and political forces, and furthering knowledge for its own sake in their respective academic disciplines. However, some scholars have embraced the public-engaged scholarship worldview, although they maintain it in conflict with the goals of humanities disciplines. Alternatively, other humanities scholars center the civic, ethical, and public purposes of their work. The author outlines the historical origins of the two main academic paradigms in higher education, the “orators” and the “philosophers” that led to these distinctions. The more “public,” humanities-based orientation, the orators, evolved first, and it offers its own justification for the humanities in support of public-engaged scholarship. The author proposes additional exploration of this tradition, particularly its understanding of knowledge for ethical and civic action through the “new humanities,” which can serve as a theoretical foundation for the humanities in the ways that humanistic sociology became that site of practice for engaged sociologists. Concepts, such as participation, beauty, and practical wisdom, can help develop an authentically humanities-based approach to engagement.

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In this paper I consider how Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics can complement the pragmatic theory that has informed the field of service-learning, and with its emphasis on community and respect for others, can offer an orientation to further the work of service-learning and community engagement in a mutually satisfying way for scholars, practitioners, and community partners. In keeping with Gadamer's contention that mythological thinking has its rightful place alongside analytical thinking, I provide an interpretation of the myth of Hermes for emancipatory education practice, and then invite readers to consider some implications of philosophical hermeneutics through traditional philosophical exposition. I posit there is much to be gained by framing community engagement as a civic art or practical beauty with a distinct epistemological foundation that values conversation, participation, and openended, collective processes to work for the common good. This orientation would require us to reconsider the purposes and reorient the values of this field of educational practice.

Hannah Arendt's essays about the 1957 crisis over efforts of a group of youth, the “Little Rock Nine,” to desegregate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, reveal a tension in her vision of the “public.” In this article Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy look closely at the experiences of the youth desegregating the school, especially those of Elizabeth Eckford, drawing upon them to trace a continuum of forms of public engagement in Arendt's work. This ranges from arenas of “deliberative friendship,” where unique individuals collaborate on common efforts, to a more conflictual “public stage,” where groups act in solidarity to change aspects of the public world. While Arendt famously asserted in her essay “The Crisis in Education” that political capacities should not be taught in schools, it makes more sense to see this argument as focused on what she sometimes called the conflictual “public stage,” reflecting the experience of the Little Rock Nine. In contrast, Schutz and Sandy argue that Arendt's own work implies that “deliberative friendship,” as described in her essay “Philosophy and Politics” and elsewhere, should be part of everyday practices in classrooms and schools.