Volunteer-Coordinator-in-Chief
Chris Dodd, erstwhile Democratic candidate for president, has an idea:
He proposes making community service mandatory for all high school students, doubling the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and expanding the AmeriCorps national service program to 1 million participants by the end of his presidency.
Requiring community service will give high school students a chance to acquire new skills while meeting the needs of their communities, Dodd said.
"If the chat rooms and online communities of today show us anything, it is that young people yearn for shared experiences," he said. "All they are missing, in my view, is leadership from us to redirect that interest toward community service."
I am overwhelmed by the arrogance of this. Expanding AmeriCorp - fine. Expanding Peace Corps - fine, as long as their doing productive things. But mandatory volunteerism? That's just oxymoronic, with emphasis on the "moronic."
Conscripting kids into community service has all sorts of problems. First is the apathy problem. Online communities are cool with kids because they get to go and forge their own identities. They opt into participation. But teenagers, broadly speaking, do not respond well to being forced to do things. You have to let kids decide what's hip - you can't force hip on kids.
The second problem is a supply-and-demand problem. Required community service leads to too many people available for not enough substantive tasks, leading to make-work community service instead of service that actually adds value in society. And, in fact, you may undermine and severely hurt important efforts because kids who have no interest in being there will purposefully do a bad job.
I'm glad we are hearing more policy proposals out of presidential candidates, and at least conscription-based community service doesn't involve spending taxpayer money (at least on its surface). However, let's hope that the candidates contemplate more than just the p.r. value of their ideas and actually give thought to how the secondary and tertiary effects of those ideas help better society - or, in Dodd's case, don't.
2 comments:
nothing will turn kids off to volunteering more than if they are given volunteer jobs where they are not needed and that are meaningless to them. From 7th grade to 11th grade I volunteered at our local hospital. I loved it, but even so was frequently faced with 'shifts' of doing nothing because nothing needed to be done. Sometimes it would take more work for someone to find a job for me. Those days left me feeling terrible and in the way. I don't think mandatory volunteer service will do anything but increase the uselessness teenagers already feel.
campaigns to encourage them to CHOOSE to volunteer are an entire other issue though.
peace corps is hard to get into as it is. How would he like to pay for the peace corp overhead? Does he invision sending 17 year olds to a 3rd world country to do... what? Will those countries end up having to spend their few resources to feed and protect the american kids there to "help"?
don't get me started on the peace corps/americcorps programs as they stand today.
Promoters of forced volunteerism rarely note that programs such as Peace Corps and AmeriCorps are PAID positions. While it below minimum wage, these are not volunteer positions, these are paid jobs.
Volunteers are the people who deliver Meals on Wheels, prepare dinners for the guys at The Extension, baby-sit for a friend or pick up trash along the roadside 9without the necessity of an orange jumpsuit).
These folks volunteer because they want to, not because they are forced to. The required volunteerism effort comes from the liberal side of the tracks who would rather pay someone else to volunteer for them, instead of doing it themselves.
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