It has been controversial whether school authority should impose mandatory volunteer work hours on students. Some people maintain that students need to pursue mandatory volunteer work, citing that students will earn invaluable experience that they can’t seek in classroom. However, I think that school authority should not enforce volunteer work on students not only because volunteer work is meaningful only when it is done voluntarily, not but also because the top priority of students should be doing schoolwork.
Most conspicuously, students can draw meaningful and live lesson only when they pursue volunteer work with sincere intention. In other words, when such work is forcibly imposed on students, many students will do it for credit or for other purposes, rather than for good will. For example, it is not hard to find students who seek to do volunteer work just to write about such experience on their resume or graduate school essays. I doubt that they will learn virtue of helping others and community. For a short period of time, though community may be benefitted (get benefit from) by the enforcement, it can’t expect long-term support because students will not come back after they earn what they wanted
In addition, only students who have extra time should participate in volunteer work. If they are not following up on their daily school work, school needs to hinder them from doing anything other than studying. To take my friend Jenny as an example, when her GPA was as low as academic probation level after a spring semester, she joined rural community support trip instead of summer school. I do not underrate her learnings from the trip. However, for that lesson, she traded her grades that she can could never make up, as school days never come back.
All in all, volunteer work is a useful method for teaching what community or society means to students. However, the method is meaningful when participation is done voluntarily and when students know how to prioritize their works. In this sense, I strongly maintain that volunteer work should not be compulsory for college students.
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