To Whom This May Concern,” wrote a local college student in a recent e-mail, “For one of my school assignments I am required to participate in volunteer work. I was wondering if you could provide me with any information on how I could go about doing this at your school.”
I chuckled to myself while I read the message. Compulsory volunteerism is one of my favorite oxymorons. It always brings a smile to my face.
Actually, that’s not true. It chagrins me to no end that now we think we have to compel young people to perform acts of kindness. I’m talking more than pet peeve here.
Two major things are wrong with compulsory volunteerism by my reckoning:
First, as a writer striving for the precise use of language, I can’t seem to overlook the fact that, by definition, to “volunteer” means to do something of one’s own free will, and without receiving any compensation in return. Forcing a student to volunteer violates both conditions: The free will is removed from the act and there is the extrinsic reward of satisfying the requirement.
Second of all, it erodes the spirit of giving, which is a sacred act. It robs the giver of the full satisfaction that results from performing a true act of charity. Likewise for the recipient, who will never know the giver’s real intent.
But what is so wrong with insisting that kids try out the experience of giving to others? This is the argument of my niece, who attends an elite private academy in another city. If the students at her school weren’t made to do it, she informed me, then most of them probably wouldn’t.
How did we get to this point? I can’t help but feel that our system of education is at least partly to blame. It has become trendy these days to require students to perform a token amount of “community service,” as volunteering is more commonly referred to today. Many high schools, and now some universities, have established it as a graduation requirement.
And perhaps the problem runs deeper still. In 99.5% of our nation’s schools there is very little that is voluntary. Perhaps it is simply the logical next step to dice volunteering into the soup, too.
Meanwhile, as I write this, a community group in my city is busy organizing the Thanksgiving dinner that it holds every year for those with nowhere to go for a special meal on the fourth Thursday in November, or nobody to share it with. They fed over 6,000 people in 2001, making it one of the largest such efforts in the U.S.
How do they do it? You guessed it: entirely with volunteers, young and old. When my wife and daughters and I assist with the cooking on Wednesday evening, there is often very little to do. There are too many helpers — and no one is getting credit for it.
Chris Mercogliano has been a teacher at the Free School in Albany, New York, since 1973, working with children from ages two to fourteen. In 1987 he was named co-director. An environmental activist, he has recently been appointed to the mayor’s advisory committee on recycling and waste reduction. He is also an essayist, poet, organic farmer, mason, plumber, and journeyman carpenter. He is the author of Making It Up As We Go Along, a book about his experiences at the Free School over the past twenty years.
Photo from the LOC. Children aiming sticks as guns, lined up against a brick building, Washington, D.C. Taken between 1941 and 1942.