Required community service for graduation

The following is excerpted from Twenty Years at Hull-House, a 1910 memoir by Jane Addams, who founded Hull-House, a settlement house in Chicago that offered classes and services to immigrant families. Here she describes educated young people of her time.

There is a heritage of noble obligation which young people accept and long to perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish to right wrong and alleviate suffering haunts them daily. Society smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself. The wrong to them begins even farther back, when we restrain the first childish desires for "doing good", and tell them that they must wait until they are older and better fitted. We intimate that social obligation begins at a fixed date, forgetting that it begins at birth itself. […]

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily.

The following is excerpted from an essay by a college first-year student about her own service hours, published in a collection of student writing about high school.

My high school required forty hours of service. I did mine the way most of my friends did: the cheapest, fastest way possible. I logged twelve hours handing out water at a 5K, ten hours shelving books at the public library, and the rest at my aunt's church rummage sale. I got the signatures, turned in the form, and never thought about it again.

I'm not proud of that, but I'm also not sure it's my fault. Nobody asked me what I cared about, or helped me find a place where my hours would matter. The requirement measured time, so I gave it time. If a school wants students to care about their communities, a form with forty empty lines is a strange way to show it.

The following is excerpted from an article by a high school service-learning coordinator in a magazine for teachers.

After fifteen years running our district's service program, I can tell you exactly when it works and when it doesn't. It doesn't work when the requirement is a number of hours and nothing else. Students learn to game a number. It works when students choose a problem they care about, spend real time with the people affected, and then reflect on what they saw, in writing, in discussion, or in a presentation to the school board.

Last year a group of sophomores who started out tutoring at an elementary school noticed that many of the children came to school hungry. They researched the district's breakfast program, found that most families didn't know it existed, and designed flyers in three languages. Breakfast participation at that school rose by a third. No form with forty lines produces that. But without the requirement, I'm not sure those sophomores would have walked into that school at all.

The following is excerpted from a letter that a high school junior wrote to her school board.

I work twenty hours a week at a restaurant, and on the days I'm not working I pick up my two little sisters from school and watch them until my mom gets home at seven. I'm not complaining. My family needs me, and I'm proud that I help. But when the counselor told me I was behind on my service hours, I wanted to ask who she thought was taking care of my sisters.

If the board keeps the requirement, it should count the work students already do for their families and neighbors. Otherwise it's a requirement that's easy for students with free time and hard for everyone else.