Today is Random Acts of Kindness Day

Stick a dime in the expired parking meter of a stranger's car. Visit a housebound relative. Compliment a coworker. Let a harried parent and child check out ahead of you at the supermarket. Help serve dinner at a local soup kitchen. Give up your seat on the bus. Write a note of thanks to someone who has had an influence on your life. Collect bottles and cans for recycling and give the proceeds to charity. Smile. It's Random Acts of Kindness Day.


In reflection of this rather banal but ultimately beneficial "holiday". I thought it was appropiate to discuss community service, and its overriding negative effect on society.


Nowadays, it is an all too common sight to see hours upon hours of community service piled onto the ever-thickening college resume. In fact, the number of 16- to 19-year-old volunteers rose from 4.3 million in 2002 to nearly 4.8 million in 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports (Magee). Why in the last half decade, has there been such a large trend toward youth philanthropy? Clearly it is not solely caused by a sudden change of heart amongst members of Generation Y to provide for the common good, more so than its predecessors. In all actuality, more than anything, this trend towards increased service to the community can be attributed to government action. At least 23 states and countless school districts have some policy on the books that support youth service or service-learning (ECS.org). While this enforced service has definitely made recent statistics more pleasing to the eye, we must now ask ourselves, is service being done for the sake of doing it? With the advent of much more menial service with the simple goal of racking up hours to meet graduation requirements, has meaningful service lost some its luster? Despite the fact that mandatory service has indeed increased community awareness and understanding of the importance of service amongst students, this new wave of community service has made the truly beneficial service projects of yesteryear diminish in both value and prestige.

America’s movement towards increased community service has started at the top, with governmental action implementing mandatory community service requirements. While proponents of such legislation argue that such requisites is but one form of citizenship education, far too many of the alleged students have felt that this is simply involuntary servitude. According to the Education Commission of the States, students in the City of Philadelphia must complete a service-learning project to advance from the 4th, 8th or 12th grades. (ECS.org) Making a service project requisite for advancement from the 12th grade is but a surreptitious and underhanded way of making service a graduation requirement. Such action, designed to benefit students and the greater district is actually hurting the district as precious funds are being diverted from more meaningful projects towards providing professional development in service-learning methodology for teachers and other staff.

While well-intentioned legislation enforcing community service is at best mildly detrimental to the districts administered on, a thorn in the sides of the students at the very worst. Perhaps Ramos-Mrosovsky, a senior at Princeton University said it best:
“They should reflect that the value they are trying to promote depends on a sense of duty, not necessity. They risk exacerbating a dynamic through which students may increasingly come to see volunteer service as just one more box to check on the climb of life: the moral equivalent of gym class, sex education, or chemistry.”

It is quite clear that the goal of mandatory service is to foster a sense of duty and responsibility in students, one that they would carry for the rest of their lives. Yet as Mrosovsky mentioned, the results of their actions are far from that, diminishing the value of the once chivalrous act of community service.

Another alarming trend in the greater topic of community service is the apparent rise of counterproductive, or at the very least, inefficient service projects done with the sole intent of padding college resumes. The following conversation between a Princeton alumnus, who at the time was attending the university and a young “future leader”, brings this concern into focus.

"So," I asked, "what are you doing this summer?"
"I'm setting up a nonprofit to help at-risk youth attend college."
"That's great," I replied. "How are you going to fund it?"
"That's kind of the problem. I don't really know how to get any money for it."

This future leader, certainly a person with much skill, could have devoted his talent, his enthusiasm, and his passion towards bettering the community through an established non-profit organization yet instead went ahead with the option that best fit his agenda, in this case his college resume. It is a shame that such great ambition to make a difference, or at least get into college, was wasted on creating a program that would not benefit the community as much as an established one. The spirit of community service, the idea of helping others with no considerations of personal gain has been lost.

There is no debate as to whether or not community service has increased these past few years, be it through governmental action, the desire for students to spruce up their college resumes, or simple prodding from parents. Youth volunteering is up 12% over the last 10 years, the hard numbers do not lie. It is a proven fact that teenagers volunteer 2.4 billion hours annually. However, we should be weary of some statistics provided to the masses.
According to the University of California-Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute, youth who volunteer are more likely to do well in school, graduate, vote, and be philanthropic.

What false conclusions is this leading us to draw? Is this inferring that the simple act of volunteering makes one more likely to succeed later in life? Perhaps, initially the idea that if a person volunteers, he/she is more likely to be successful should mean that volunteering is the cause for success. But if we analyze it from another perspective, the much more logical perspective; it makes much more sense to say that the same cause that caused one to volunteer is the same cause that allows people to do well in school, graduate, vote, and be philanthropic. This statistic includes people such as the future leader, who did “community service” out of the simple act of padding a resume, this ambition to succeed is the same one that would likely cause him to do well in school, and graduate, yet the true spirit of service to the community is not present. The perversion of community service from an act to benefit society into a cruel and heartless machine of superficial philanthropy must end NOW.