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<?page nr="1"?>Abstract This article investigates the ways in which service-learning manifests within our neoliberal clime, suggesting that service-learning amounts to a foil for neoliberalism, allowing neoliberal political and economic changes while masking their damaging effects. Neoliberalism shifts the relationship between the public and the private, structures higher education, and promotes a façade of community-based university partnerships while facilitating a pervasive regime of control. This article demonstrates that service-learning amounts to an enigma of neoliberalism, making possible the privatization of the public and the individualizing of social problems while masking evidence of market-based societal control. Neoliberal service-learning distances service from teaching and learning, allows market forces to shape university-community partnerships, and privatizes the public through dispossession by accumulation.

This article investigates the way that service-learning educators make use of John Dewey’s philosophy of education. A hermeneutical analysis of service-learning literature demonstrates that in establishing Dewey as a theoretical framework, service-learning educators separate learning from service in their thinking, teaching, and writing. Thus, this article considers the effect of distancing learning from service on students’ assumptions of community and the communities served via service-learning. When service-learning educators ignore the bedrock of their theoretical foundation, service-learning practices have the potential to perpetuate ritualized relief, or a routinization of response to community need that harms communities served and students’ server mindsets.