Good Deeds: The Backlash
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/fashion/27service.html?_r=1&ref=education
In this article called, ‘Good Deeds: The Backlash’, it explains how high school students are “engaged in the relentless pursuit of community service hours”. The article coniues on explaining how 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 can move in. (Three hours.)
On the other side of town, students from Lincoln High School, a public school in Yonkers, are raucously demolishing the basement of a thrift store on Riverdale Avenue, to create space for storage. (Four hours.)
On ”East 27th Street in Manhattan, a hostess at the upscale barbecue restaurant Blue Smoke is turning away the fifth person who showed up a day early looking to make crafts for underprivileged children. The restaurant’s Web site had the right date, she insists, but students these days seem pretty desperate to volunteer. (Come back tomorrow; two hours.)”
All this volunteering, especially during the holidays are for the requirments that students have to meet for graduation. A lot of high schools are now cutting the requirments because they believe it is meaningless and that its “a form of forced altruism”.
Schools were finding that the fixation was more on hours and less for the service. What was begining to happen was wealthy families were knocking out the community service requirment all in one trip, such as a summer thing.
What has happened in one NY school is that “Ms. Swierczek abolished Riverdale’s requirement that students perform more than 100 hours of service before graduation. Instead, she decreed that all “naturally formed communities” at the school — sports teams, the school newspaper and adviser groups, to which all students belong — must tackle a community service project each year that is approved and supervised by her.”
“The result, she said, is a renewed focus on the charitable experience itself. “The message we want to teach our children is to live in a world bigger than their own,” she said. “It’s provided real camaraderie within the school community.”
I think the article is true. I think that students become so worried about the 100 hours and less worried about the good deed they are actually doing. In my student council in high school, we arranged a trip to the soup kitchen, not for graduation requirments, but for our own interests. I never felt so moved from my experience. It taught me a lot and made me realize, like stated in the article, that there is a world bigger than my own.
December 2, 2008 at 4:44 am
I agree with you whole heartedly. When I was in high school, I was required to complete community service in order for me to meet the requirements of admittance in the National Honor’s Society. I volunteered at a local church where I assisted students in an after school homework hot line program. I liked this experience a great deal. I have since done my fair share of volunteer work because I enjoy doing it. However, I have noticed with my younger family members and their friends that have to complete community service for school, that they are more concerned with getting the hours over with than they are with actually helping those around them. Many kids now have totally lost site of the fact that there “is a world that is bigger than their own” and it is sad. I think that by making the organizations complete a community service project, the experience as a whole will prove to be much more beneficial. It will allow the students a chance to concentrate on the deed that they are doing versus the individual hours that they are completing.