The Importance Of Volunteering In Education

Are We Losing Our Civic Values? With the concept of “mandatory volunteerism” burgeoning within the education system, both public and private high schools alike are beginning to debate as to whether or not they should all mandate community service. “Mandatory volunteerism” is exactly as defective as it sounds. This term refers to the enforcement of community service within a school. This concept should be negated, as it would devalue the sole purpose of having community service, exclude students’ circumstances, and should instead be replaced with a slow assimilation of civic education within each of the schools. When volunteering is discussed, alongside civic values and moral duty, there needs to be a sense of willingness within the task …show more content…
When the education system begins to mandate volunteering as a high school graduation requirement, or as hours needed to be cleared, the whole value of volunteering begins to diminish, ever so slightly. Volunteering is not meant to be a task that needs to simply be completed in order to fulfill a requirement, and if the state allows for education to endorse this, then there is little value left from students’ civic duties. Additionally, this is also shown in “Community Service Can Discourage Those Not Ready for Volunteering” when the article discusses the “state and local governments’ [need] for volunteers in the United States to make up for the losses [of eliminated public programs and services].” Again, this emphasizes that the concept of volunteering is slowly being lost, and in this case, it is merging with the concept of free labor, which undermines the true purpose of every human being’s natural moral duty: helping others. Moreover, in the University of Wisconsin-Madison News, Dennis Chaptman states that “resume padding is a symptom of the extraordinary …show more content…
In “Youth Attitudes Toward Civic Education and Community Service Requirements”, the Council for Excellence (a governmental subdivision) took a national survey and, recorded that between the ethnicity/race/gender of students, there is no clear consensus as to whether or not community service for a high school diploma should require community service (Lopez). Hypothetically, if a mandated community service were to be implemented, then there wouldn’t be a majority to support the decision, only indecision. The unclear majority means that the law simply cannot enforce mandatory community service upon schools, because that would be a costly generalization of circumstance. On the contrary, in “Community Service: Opportunity or Exploitation?”, a survey from 1996 showed that only 19% of students participated in schools where their service was required but not arranged (Newquist). This shows how having a mandatory call for volunteering cannot be simply made expecting results, but it also shows that if students are simply left to do what they choose to do, then there will be little results as well. And so, the only solution to the problem is one that is in the middle of these two radical options placed before the education system. If the civic education course were to be assimilated into the education system as it is, the community