by Timou

Created on: June 29, 2009   Last Updated: July 10, 2009

I am strongly against making it a requirement for high school students to volunteer in community projects. I am from Singapore, and here, most secondary schools and junior colleges (or high schools as it is more commonly known in the United States) make it mandatory for students to commit a certain number of hours of community service before they can progress to the next higher level of education. Being a part of this system itself, perhaps I would be well placed to provide my own perspective on this issue.

The first problem that mandating community service for high school students runs into is that it kills the very essence of contributing to the community. Serving the community, and particularly serving vulnerable segments of society such as the disabled and the elderly, requires a spirit of altruism and giving. By making community service yet another academic requirement, community volunteers can no longer be called such, not when the services they are rendering are tainted by an ulterior motive.

Beyond a student participating in community service solely to fulfill an academic requirement, the real harm comes when the student sees community service as something that adds to his academic credentials in pursuing an application into an institute of higher learning. In such situations, community projects become nothing more than mere tools that the student can manipulate in the pursuit of personal goals. This erodes the very foundation of charity and altruism that community volunteerism is built on.

But proponents of mandatory community service might then argue that only by requiring students to participate can they be introduced to the world of community involvement and volunteerism. I disagree. I believe that it is much more sustainable to ignite a passion within the hearts of youth through sharing sessions and mentoring, rather than to provide short-term incentives to boost the volunteer pool. I am convinced that a volunteer that contributes out of his own willingness to give back to society is worth much more than ten volunteers who participate merely for academic credit.

Granted, the path to inculcating the spirit of volunteerism is an arduous one that may take a long time to yield results, but that is the only sure and sustainable way to building a base of dedicated volunteers who are contributing and participating for the right reasons.

The only reason I could imagine for supporting mandatory community service is the fact that quite a number of community projects do not require long-term commitments from volunteers. Some activities such as fund raising carnivals are ad-hoc and on-off events that require 'grunt' work. In such situations, dedicated volunteers would be too few to provide the manpower needed to run such events. Mandatory community service would thus provide the short-term boost to the volunteer pool so that the event can be carried out successfully.

Perhaps only then do I feel that introducing mandatory community service in high schools have some reasonable basis.

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