Community Service Hours

One benefit of having a requirement for community service hours before graduation is that it "benefits the community and encourages responsibility" (Simrin Gupta, Silver Chips Online, 3/10/11). Community service is a way to give back to the surrounding community. Having students go out of their comfort zone to help people, teaches them responsibility, and helps give them increased productivity. This can also teach people how to begin to help their community when they are needed most.

Although community service is a good thing, Claire Koenig says that requiring it just takes away from the meaning of volunteer work (Silver Chips Online, 3/10/11). Community service is good, but when somebody is forced to do it, the work becomes almost pointless. While it still helps the community, it also pushes away many students from volunteer work when they may have desired to do it more if it was not required.

Overall, I believe that community service should not be required. It should be something that people may want to strive for as part of an extra part of their life, but it should not be forced. The point of community service is to offer up your time to be able to help other people or organizations, and when people are reluctantly doing this, there is no moral value.