Teaching Community Service in Schools

I recently attended a meeting of several people involved in youth service including Senator Harris Wofford, former head of AmeriCorp, to discuss the possibility of National Youth Service. The main discussion was how to incorporate community service into the educational system in our country. Teddy Gross, who founded Common Cents, a New York based organization in 40 school districts told us that after growing up in Jerusalem in the 50’s he was quite disillusioned when he moved to the United States at the age of 11 because he felt he didn’t count anymore. Jim Kielmeier, President of National Youth Leadership Council, pointed out that many young people in poor communities do not have the opportunity to volunteer because of economic status. And Colin Greer, president of The New World Foundation noted that the reason we have to require community service in this country is the varying degrees of apathy that stems from the way we treat our young people to look at the future: its how much you have and how much you earn. The way we nurture children in this country has a great degree to why they are not engaged to do more community service. We do not ask for their opinion or ideas. I pointed out that it seemed wrong for us to be having this meeting about youth and community service without one young person present. Mark Gelber, president of KIDS (Kids in Distressed Situations) noted that each time they had young people at his meetings they accomplished more and the meetings were livelier. Why can’t we trust our young people to volunteer on their own? We know that most people believe that current youth generation only care about self. However Steve Culbertson , president of Youth Service America pointed out that among the current generation of young people drug, alcohol and cigarette use are down. College enrollment is up, more kids are religious and more kids are volunteering now than in the past thirty years. It’s the media that does not want to tell us the good things about young people. We will get reports all year long about the Columbines of the world, but how much space in print and on broadcast will be given to the thousands of good deeds that are a normal part of everyday life for kids? Someone quoted a report that said when asked what was the most pressing problem of the day about 50% of the young people polled responded social and individual morality and the decline in values. Several of us agreed that what young people mean by morality may not be what we mean. Ask them and they may say the way we treat the environment is immoral, labor issues that involve youth are immoral, campaign finance is immoral. What we have to do is accept the fact that “old knowledge” is not always applicable to “new kids”.

Go To Page: 1 2 3

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic