Not long before the Matthew Nisbet post about uncharitable atheists crossed my RSS feeds, I had marked a Fred Clark post about mission trips that has some really good thoughts about the mechanics of charity:
But the point of these mission trips is not only to get [a rural school in Haiti] built. That's part of it, but it's not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. The problem with the calculus above is that it presumes that the total level of contribution is a constant. That assumption is probably not true. It's unlikely that the youth group, the church, or any other given community here would raise the same amount of money without the personal stake of the trip itself.
The purpose of the mission trip is not exclusively to change the Haitian community where the school is to be built. Part of the purpose of the trip is also to change the young Americans who are going there, and to change the community that sends them. Part of the reason for such trips is to nurture a sense of empathy, of solidarity, and an ethos of service -- to create and maintain the capacity to care whether or not children in Haiti have a decent place to go to school, and to create and maintain the desire to help.
His post was motivated by Sen. Chris Dodd's proposal of a national service plan, and he has some good comments about that as well:
I'm still not completely sure what to think about Dodd's idea of mandatory service as a requirement for high school graduation. I get the impulse -- a self-absorbed little prick really shouldn't be handed a diploma and declared "educated" until someone has pointed out to him that he shouldn't be such a self-absorbed little prick. And the idea of mandatory service for high school students begins to look more attractive the more you listen to the whining of its most vocal opponents. Yet for all of that "mandatory service" still seems like an oxymoron.
This "mandatory service" business is an idea that has started to gain a surprising amount of traction, even among liberal academics.
The other day at lunch, a colleague suggested that it would be good to put an age limit on college enrollment-- no students would be accepted before the age of 20, and they would be expected to spend the two-ish years between high school and college doing some sort of service work. It has a certain amount of promise-- those two years could increase the maturity level of our students quite a bit, and if you coupled it with a lowering of the drinking age to 20, you could wipe out a lot of other problems as well.
Still, I'm not sure I buy the concept, for more or less the same reasons that Fred gives. "Mandatory service" seems inherently contradictory. A big part of the benefit of community service work is supposed to come from personal fulfillment and spiritual betterment, and I'm not sure you really get that if people are forced to serve.
Then again, I don't know anything about mandatory service, having been born late enough that the military draft was unthinkable by the time I hit high school. I know I have some readers from countries with mandatory military service, though-- do you have any thoughts on the issue?
It should also be noted that while community service is not a formal requirement for graduation, for students headed to a certain level of elite colleges and universities, it's moving onto the list of de facto requirements for college admissions. My impression is that most of our entering students have done at least some sort of community service activity in high school, as application padding if nothing else. I'm not connected enough with either admissions or campus community service organizations to be able to assess the sincerity of their committment to service, though, but it would probably be interesting to look at those students, and might provide some useful data in discussing the idea of mandatory service.
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I had a friend from Germany, which has mandatory (2 year?) service. This can be military service, but it doesn't have to be: my friend worked in a retirement community or something. He wasn't too happy about it. He said that when you factor in a 2-year delay in starting education, plus the 5 year degree that is typical there, a graduating student is 3 years behind new graduates in some other countries such as the US. He didn't appreciate the delay in starting a career, especially when competing against those from other countries. (Ok, now I will probably hear about how a 5 year degree from a German institution is better than a 4 year degree from a US institution, and the students are more mature or whatnot, but I'm just pointing out an anecdote: there are down sides to such proposals. Then again, if everybody did it, you couldn't use the excuse that you get behind others...)
I don't necessarily agree with the idea of mandatory service, but I do think that service options could be made more attractive to high school students. If the gov't encouraged on some level a form of local support to service - either abroad or community - then I think you might see many more high school students willing to volunteer some time to do so. It could be as simple as the high school students volunteering for a "service semester" where they would have abbreviated but continuing studies along with some kind of service.
I like the idea of encouraging service, but as a mandatory part of graduation from high school? Not so much. Instead, what about attaching a term of service as a condition for government-funded scholarships, grants, and loans?
In Ontario, part of the current requirements for an Ontario Secondary School Diploma is 40 hours of community service before you graduated. I'm not really sure what high school students think of this, as it was added to the curriculum after I had graduated, and OAC/Gr13 was abolished.
Ambitwistor, the 5-year first degrees German universities used to give were Master's degrees (with a research component and thesis required), so they were indeed better. But they are now changing to the two-degree Bachelor/Master system familiar from American universities, because commercial employers complained that German Master graduates were too highly qualified (I kid you not) and they would rather want Bachelors instead.
As for compulsory service, as a German I also had to do it (it hasn't been two years for a long time, by the way -- nine months military or twelve months civilian service [for conscientious objectors] is the current norm if I recall correctly). I worked in the NMR department of the German Cancer Research Centre, looking after their computer network and assisting with data processing for their clinical and scientific studies, as well as doing anything that came up. It was a great time, and I learnt a lot.
The same is true for most of my friends, whether they were in the military (one e.g. was in the Bundeswehr's musical band, where he got to practise his clarinet a lot) or objected and did civilian service. Of course it depends on yourself -- you have to apply for the interesting positions, otherwise you get sent somewhere which likely means creeping through the mud or pushing wheelchairs down the corridor. The people who hate their service time are mostly the ones who can't be bothered to investigate what they would like to do and make an effort to apply to go there.
There are some issues with the German system, though: mostly it has become rather unjust, because a lot of young men never get called up for service for administrative reasons. And the fact that women don't have to serve is also a little out of touch with modern realities. But generally I think it is a good thing, because among other things it makes sure that the military remains tied in with civilian society; and the German social and healthcare system would likely collapse without "Zivis" (young men doing civilian service).
As far as the sort of "service" that's popular as college-application-padding, I think there's at least as much sanctimony involved as actual good. I'm also not quite sure that the subtext of many service opportunities is useful. This occured to me back in high school when I was volunteering one day at the local soup kitchen type places that gave free meals to, basically, whomever, but presumably the homeless and working poor and so forth. There were several of us serving, from comfortable middle class homes. But is there something about serving food to the hungry that requires a middle-class background? Amongst the kitchen's patrons, aren't there at least a few unemployed people for whom the job experience of working there could make a real difference in their ability to find a paid job and not need to rely on the soup kitchen? Isn't the whole soup-kitchen model reinforcing the notion that its patrons are helpless and can survive only through the generosity of the middle class to whom, therefore, they should be grateful?
The following two articles from The Onion touch on these themes:
one about the high school volunteer, and one about the whole soup kitchen project.
His post was motivated by Sen. Chris Dodd's proposal of a national service plan...
I seem to recall something in place already for this sort of thing at the federal level... ::cough::
Also, I thought it was relatively common knowledge that this isn't a new idea. It was just rebranded as "mandatory service" because the cognitive dissonance associated with continuing to call it volunteering was too great for the public.
In my county in Maryland, at least, 75 hours of "volunteering" is required for you to graduate, but all that means is that the school found a way around it because so many kids weren't doing it. At this point, you get more than enough hours just by taking the classes required to graduate, so the only people who bother to do otherwise are those who want to be safe or those who want to do it anyways.
Since high school wasn't too great,
I'm envious of my friend who skipped it and went directly to college.
I have gradually come to favor a mandatory stint of public service as a pre-req for college. My reason is very simple, the vast majority of high school graduates lack the maturity to succeed academically. For years now, non-traditional students returning to education after a couple to several years of work and real world experience have been out achieving traditional students, and often the non-traditional students are working long hours outside of class to make ends meet and pay for their education. Mandatory service gives them a chance to grow up and learn how a bit of hard work allows them to accomplish something.
I went through the high school system in Singapore, which has mandatory service requirements for graduation from high school in addition to two years' compulsory military service for males. As far as I can tell, the requirements do nothing to instill greater maturity in students, spiritual betterment, blah blah. The people who would have done it anyway take it well. Those who never wanted to (the majority) merely felt resentment and did the minimum required of them. As such, "community service" took on negative connotations.
Still, some claim that mandatory service is still worth it for the few students it "converts".
My high school required forty hours of community service in our senior year. This was pretty easy for those who were already involved in activities that constituted service - probably 3/4 of everyone. The rest, as I recall, participated in a couple of daylong Saturday service events that were publicized or sponsored by the school and met the rest of the requirement by getting their parents to sign off on activities like "tutoring" siblings, "maintenance" work in the family yard, etc. Some extra service got done on those Saturdays, but I don't think any of the students were improved by it.
It seems like a better strategy might be to inculcate in children - before they get to be teenagers - a sense of civic responsibility. One possibility would be adding a few field trips to food banks and animal shelters to the cycle of art and natural history museums.