Whether you are, or were, a high school or college student, there is a pretty good chance that you have encountered some sort of service learning requirement, either for a particular class or for graduation. For those of you that don’t know, service learning is essentially community service hours required of students to complete in order to learn about their communities and what it means to serve others without compensation. (This is not to be confused with requirements that are meant to educate the student about the functioning of specific organizations.) While this particular requirement may have been established with good intentions, there are a few reasons why I believe that service learning requirements are overrated.
Many service learning requirements don’t necessarily specify under what circumstances the service learning must take place, only the number of hours that students must complete. Some institutions may specify that the work must take place at a government, public, or non-profit organization, so that students can’t cheat, rake leaves for an hour and get neighbor-Joe to sign off on 100 hours of work. However, most places don’t state that students must complete x number of hours at a single place. Given that, many students will do 1-2 hours at one organization or institution and move on to the next one, complete a few hours there, and so on, never really learning or gaining insight about the various places at which they volunteer their time.
Additionally, even if students only volunteer in the public sector, the number of required hours can be quite arbitrary, especially in close-knit communities. In many small towns, the person that runs the local shelter, the librarian, that one person that organizes all the town events, or any other notable figure is often the students’ neighbor anyway, meaning that he or she may sign off on more hours than the students actually put in. That’s not to say that everyone is wringing their hands, thinking of how to cheat the system, but certain students will likely have an upper hand. Some people will have the best of intentions and just want to help a good kid get his or her school’s requirements out of the way.
Which leads me to my most important point: most students don’t think about the impact they are having on their communities. They are just trying to fulfill a requirement. The whole concept about teaching students to help others without reward is sort of lost, because under these circumstances, students aren’t helping others and working for the sake of giving back to their communities. They are working to graduate. Don’t get me wrong, volunteering in one’s community is a beautiful thing, when done for the right reasons. Instead of placing requirements on students that teach them that volunteer work is just a means to an end, wouldn’t it be better to instill in them the intrinsic value of helping others?
