Community Service Hours

I have a long commute every day. Sometimes I think about crazy stuff, sometimes, less crazy. Here's my most recent self-debate, you can decide for yourself if I'm crazy. My theory is mandatory community service hours may do more harm than good for actually building a service-oriented mindset in youth.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think we desperately need to develop a stronger service orientation in our society. I think there is value in requiring people to serve in either the military (2 years minimum), or the Peace Corp, AmeriCorp, whatevercorp (4 years minimum). Service should start at some point after a person's 18th birthday but before their 25th. But those are adults who one hopes will be able to "get it." I'm not convinced it works with youth.

I work with youth in a couple of different capacities. I'm a confirmation mentor and I'm a scoutmaster. In both capacities the youth I work with are required to perform a certain number of service hours. In scouting the hours are required for advancement, for my confirmand they are required for confirmation, in our school district community service hours are required for graduation. I'm sure kids are bombarded by requirements for service hours from other organizations as well. So Derek you're saying, that's not a bad thing at all, isn't that what you asked for in the last paragraph?

Well, here's the rub, where else do we require community service hours in our society? It's a punishment meted out by the courts to keep people out of jail! Basically if you do something bad, but not so bad as to be put in jail, you get community service. When I was in the Navy, extra duty was sometimes used as punishment for minor infractions. But Derek you're saying, that's completely different.

I think it's not as different as we'd like to think. In the case of punishment we create a checklist mentality inside the criminal's mind. "Only 50 more hours to go and I don't have to go to jail." I wonder if we're not creating the same mindset in our youth. "Only 5 hours of service work left and I'm done for confirmation/advancement/graduation." Or, "I did service hours for X requirement, why can't I count those for Y requirement?" Check, check, check, get this stuff out of my way.

I'm not sure when or if we as a society lost our service orientation but it's sure not what my romantic memories of easier times tell me it was. I think the problem could be that service isn't being modeled in nearly enough places, so forcing hours on youth is not perceived as encouragement but rather punishment. As a result we are potentially creating exactly the opposite mindset as we hoped.

I hope I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just getting my practice in to be an old curmudgeon.