Community Service

Community service is unpaid work performed by a group of people or individual for the benefit of the community. It is done for a variety of reasons and is not exactly the same as volunteering because it is not always voluntarily done. Community service is done because a government may require it as a part of citizenship requirements, or courts may demand it because of committed crimes. In student's case, schools usually require students to perform a certain amount of hours of community service in order to graduate. There are many high schools around the country that require community service hours and others that do not. Students nowadays are only performing community service hours, just so they can be able to graduate from high school. The students are not doing community service because they want to, but to impress colleges and compete with other students. When students are required to perform community service throughout their years of high school, they do not complete the hours out of love. They only want to finish the hours, to in order to graduate and so it looks good on their college resumes. Community service however should be done by teens, because it is a learning experience. But the student should want to do community service and should want to help others. Students are also trying to use community service as a competition. They try to receive a load of hours just so it looks better on college resumes. Friedland says, "One implication of the study, which has yet to be proven, is that when civic engagement and volunteerism are used to achieve a short-term goal, the long-term effect of the activity may decline" (Chaptman,157). This statement made by Friedland, explains that students can achieve their goals by getting into colleges, because of many hours of community service, but they will lose their long term goal, which is actually learning from those hours put into helping the community. Schools requiring students to perform a certain amount of community service hours, does not help them learn the value it, because they are doing it for themselves rather than for others.