[ASTalumna06]

I believe the people here who are against mandatory community service don’t think it’s a bad thing (otherwise I don’t think they’d be Greek!). Personally, I don’t think that it should be MANDATORY right now when there haven’t been any mass efforts to include community service in the national educational system up to this point. And while it might be completely feasible for one community to have programs like this, for another, the schools have books that haven’t been updated since the first President Bush was in office. Why put money toward an extra program when they’re not even up-to-date with the basics?

If you want to include community service in the process of learning, why not have community service-based field trips? Food drives? Small daily contributions from students to a local charity? A “buddy system” where freshmen are paired with upperclassmen who guide them through their first year at school?

Some students have so many extra-curriculars that they already have too much going on. Some students aren’t able to venture too far from home after school because of transportation issues. Some students are already too unmotivated to do school work. There are numerous reasons why making community service mandatory on a national level might not be the best idea right now.

And if you really want to get technical, the national government can’t make programs like this mandatory. They shouldn’t have a hand in education at all, but that’s a different argument for another day.

If you want to provide the option and offer incentives, I think that sounds like a marvelous idea. With the ‘$4000/100 hours community service’ program, you could also offer this to high school students in order to help them pay for college. Or you could have a plan where 100 hours in high school will get you $3000, and an additional 50 hours in college will get you another $1000. Whatever it happens to be, it doesn’t much matter… it should be an OPTION.

Because I know that I’d probably be one of those extremely busy high school kids adding on a few extra hours for each activity I did, since I can pretty much guarantee that there wouldn’t be a whole lot of people like RedefinedDiva to check up on my progress.