Posted on 11/27/2008 7:01:36 AM PST by reaganaut1
Through the holidays and beyond, high school students will be working feverishly to serve the needy — packing food baskets, ladling meals at soup kitchens, collecting toys for children in hospitals — all in the name of amassing the community service credits they need for graduation.
Cynics call these programs a form of forced altruism. Proponents say that they widen students’ horizons while getting service work done. Either way, the backlash has begun: not only do college admissions officers roll their eyes at bogus-sounding claims, but high schools are scaling back the requirements, acknowledging that a lot of the so-called service is meaningless.
When Lauren Swierczek took over last year as director of community service at Riverdale Country School, a private school in the Bronx whose students hail mainly from Manhattan (tuition: about $35,000 a year), she was troubled by the program she inherited. “What I was finding was that the fixation was more on hours than acts of service,” she said. Worse still, some students “weren’t actually doing it,” she said. “Documents were forged.”
Students from wealthy families were “knocking out their service hours with one total trip,” like a three-week summer jaunt to Costa Rica or the Galápagos Islands, Ms. Swierczek said. These teen tours, which cost $4,000 or more, use as a selling point the ability to rack up as many as 80 hours of community service. When they are not cleaning debris from beaches or teaching English to local schoolchildren, the travelers enjoy heavy doses of kayaking and scuba lessons.
...
Mrs. Stern recalled being dismayed watching her eldest son, a ninth grader, do the kind of community service that helped no one, like stacking books in a synagogue library or checking its pens for ink.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The liberals want to take over community service, there are plenty of people already volunteering, the liberals want to be able to claim this as their own even though they aren’t doing the work.
My kids’ high school had a mandatory service learning requirement. Every June at the Awards Ceremony they would give a plaque to the student who did the most hours. My son’s senior year they honored a girl who had listed an astronomical amount of hours, we’re talking THOUSANDS. My daughter and I did the math-—to accomplish all those hours she could have only slept 3 hours a day.
I have a friend whose daughters, to fulfill their school’s “voluntary” community service mandate, staffed a gun-rights advocacy booth at half-a-dozen gun shows, throughout the year.
Five students from Horace Mann, a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, are spackling and painting a half-gutted, partly bullet-riddled home on Porach Street so that a new family group of crack addicts, pimps, hos, welfare cheats, baby mamas, and general lowlifes can move in and trash it all over again until it is once more unlivable. Then they will move out and the process will begin again.
bump
If I were His Excellency I’d do the “compulsory volunteer work” differently to what has been foreshadowed.
I would prefer hi school students to have a compulsory Civics course which must be passed before graduation. The curriculum would include how Democracy works at the Local, State and Federal levels and how to participate in that Democracy both as a candidate and as a voter. Then it would cover Essential Services: the Armed Forces, Police, Ambulance, Fire Service, Customs, Taxation, Courts, Homeland Security, FEMA, &tc and how to participate in each of these. Then it would cover the not-for-profit sector and how to participate in that.
Once that was all covered, there would be 80 hours of compulsory internship in any one of the above.
Finally, an exam where 50% of the course mark was from the examination, and 50% from the internship marked by the intern’s sponsor.
Such a course would prove an invaluable grounding for the students in how to be a good Citizen. It might even steer some into an appropriate career in the service sector. And for others who have aspirations for such as Law or Accountancy, it would acquaint them with key industry relationships and provide insights into how they work, with real hands-on practise for 80 hrs.
It would be the furthest thing from indentured Labor possible: the whole point would be to churn out good Citizens.
Anyrate, that’s what I’d do if I were His Excellency. Because education is a state thing rather than a federal thing it might be difficult to swing something like this. So I’d coerce the states into doing it by witholding all Federal funding from those states who didn’t do it.
(OWWWW! it gives me a headache trying to think like His Excellency!)
> What we had in WW II was a military obligation. There is a difference, but when it comes to “community work,” the difference is huge. You get what you pay for, i.e., nothing.
In New Zealand during the forties and fifties we had something called “Compulsory Military Training” which was sometimes called “Compulsory Military Service”.
I guess if you can compulsorily “Serve Time” in gaol you can equally “Serve Time” in the Military...
If it's mandatory, it should be called servitude, not service.
I live in the twilight zone...Los Angeles.”
There are sooooo many other nicer places to live..
I speak from experience...
This is true I know. But, hubby works in the entertainment industry. We’re thinking of moving to Ventura when last kid graduates. It’s a little more conservative, (which isn’t saying much), but at least I won’t have Henry Waxman as my Congressman.
Excellent point! Go ahead you dumbass democrats and 0bamazots, try to force this disguised slavery on America and see where you end up!
Yeah, and look how they couched it: ‘’free Saturdays’’, as if YOU’VE got the day off. Its all about the verbage with the left. Fool ‘em with bs. Thats why Chomskys the High Preist of the Left.
Wonder if it would pass a constitutional test in the Supreme Court?
How does working in the Obama campaign qualify as ‘community service’ ? OH I see, they’re using the word ‘service’ as in a bull to a cow.
If you do it because you have to it’s not community service, it’s slavery.
My son has to do 8 hours of service tot eh community to satisfy the requirements for a Boy Scout merit badge. Even though our family does hundreds if not thousands of hours of service a year, we made him find something new that he hasn’t done before.
We wnet to a place that takes industrial scraps and make creative art projects for kids and spent the day sorting stuff and making supply kits.
It was fun.
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