The Absurd Requirement of Community Service

[brainiac3397]

High school, Community Service and College

The need for high school community service hours to get out of high school and the need of it to get into college. A great and colossal waste of time and loss of intellectuals.

I personally don't have that feeling to do community service and volunteer. I have nothing against helping people, but I find it absurd that my character needs to be based on FORCED VOLUNTEERSHIP. You see something wrong here? I do. Does the kid with a lot of hours actually give a damn about the poor and hungry? No. He probably doesn't.

Why? Because if he did care, he would know that preparing for college rather than wasting all those hours volunteering would give him an advantage. This advantage would equate to being successful. Sucess would lead to a position where one can affect more people in a month then he could in those four years.

Not to mention such an idea is, in my brutally honest opinion, a dead horse from a by-gone era of radical conservatism.

I also find it despicable that a college would gladly refuse a student with the credentials to succeed(not the type who is good in school, to make it clear. I mean the actually intelligent one with unique ideas and capable of advancing the human race rather than becoming a statistic). It may be hard to figure out the real from the fake, but community service is NOT a good indicator. Once that forced requirement is gone, do you think that student will give a shit about the old people or the poor people or the hungry people? No. He/She has become desentized because they now group community service/volunteering into a category of "Requirements I needed" rather than actual care.

It's also quite likely that the reason I got rejected from some colleges lay in my lack of community service simply because I don't believe in it. Period. There are organizations out there with people who dedicate their time to help. Those who don't dedicate time, dedicate money. If someone truly cares about the help, they will join and assist. If not, they will not join. That simple. No student should be required in anyway to help anyone they don't want to.

I cringe when a school gets awarded for community service. I cringe because that award becomes ammo for people who continue to support this stance of forced service.

Basically, I hate community service(I'm more the type that would just give the financial support that actually helps get things done) and I hate the fact it's a requirement for both high school graduation and for college entrance.

And I will need to prepare a well-organized report on community service and why I despise it so I can send it to the colleges I intend to apply to next year(I have to take a gap year due to some legal reasons that prevented me from applying for financial aid, meaning I won't really be able to afford. Which is advantageous because now I can carry out my plan to apply to oversea colleges in an order that will give me a whole lot more opportunities).

Community Service is nothing but physical labor. Nothing but a gauge of how obedient the slave-student is. How willing he is to conform to the rules, proven by the time he dedicates.

There are three parts: The brain, the heart and the muscle. Anytime there is the exclusion of the brain from any combination, the results become meaningless and create nothing. Anytime the brain is alone, nothing is done. It is all three that must work together and it is all three every human should learn to work with.

Community service forces the muscle without requiring the brain or heart(though one may possess the other two). Supporting it only helps further strengthen belief that it works when it truly doesn't.

I sometimes feel that the American education system is at a major disconnect with American ideals. Freedom is by favoritism, Liberty a facade, Equality a show. Democracy doesn't exist, Duty is misunderstood, Responsibility is abused. The administration is a tyranny, the victim is to blame, the good slave the most rewarded.

[V.R.]

Community service to meet graduation requirements is very bluntly forced labor. Simple as that. The whole idea is to provide a form of prison training and to condition the future generation of obedient workforces to "perform specific difficult manual tasks", as Woodrow Wilson put it.

[brainiac3397]

"You must be an Ox to get into Oxford"

[V.R.]

Enjoy your degrees on gender studies, dear yokes of oxen!

[thewake]

I had very little and none of it was required to get out of high school and it probably didn't help much when I was in college.

[TheCancer]

In my day, forcing community service on students was unheard of. I did volunteer service because I wanted to help people. It doesn't take a master linguist to see that forcing someone to volunteer is oxymoronic. It also deeply harms any cause it intends to help.

[Trekkie_Aspie]

Wow ... TheCancer ... I am not used to seeing sensible teachers. ;D

[Ky]

I haven't really told anyone, but it is impossible for me to graduate from my high school without somehow lying or cheating - one of my classes required an intensively long service project that I flat-out refused to do. I passed the class, sure, but that project was a graduation requirement.