The problem with news articles is that people overreact and don't actually think first. Student service learning hours are required for U.S. high school students (60 I believe is the minimum), and if you don't serve the hours, you won't graduate. So this guy is proposing that British minors would have to even less work and people are calling it slavery and fascism?

You can't force someone to do voluntary work. The terms are contradictory. I really hate the concept of being forced to work for free. Spending 100 hours a year in college is bullshit though. I am paying for an education and the last couple years had all of a day a week to myself. I really don't have time for a second job no matter how short a time I would need to work.

Also Montana, I never had to work community service and graduated high school. That is either recent or a local law so far as I can tell. Either way it is just as much bullshit.

Force people to give. Always a good idea. No latent resentment built in there whatsoever.

Don't encourage charity on peoples' own accord. Too radical.

Well first off this requirement goes against my right to choose what to do or not. Besides, it isn't the responsibility of teenagers to look out for the country, hell no, their responsibility is to get an education and grow up. Forcing kids to do something like this is meaningless since it will probably have the opposite effect later in their life than it was meant to have.

there's no point in passing this "law" if after these couple of years almost none of the kids will continue the social work. It's people like scifiboy that should be encouraged to do so, but not force him to do so.

Not my school they didn't.

It's espiecally ironic considering the gifts Godron Brown gave Obama.

Basically this.

So, you fucking hypocrites, how does it feel to do nothing?

To tell the truth it feels better than to be forced to do something. Go figure.

What's the big deal?

At my school during A-levels, we had to do one week of community service. Most people were happy to do it, no one complained because it was beneficial for us at the end of the day.

The reason we did it was for a General studies community project we had. We helped the reputation of a school by working closely with the community and made our school and the surrounding area a bit more pleasant. I'm all for it...

People also seem to think that community service is a punishment, when it is not in a lot of cases. Therefore it has a mystique of social wrongdoing and the very bottom rung of society about it.

^ You know, from my point of view Poland has seen this before, during the social comunistic reign. Back then every kid had to do social work because the government said so. Now if they'd try to reinstate the idea it would've failed miserably.

Not to mention that the more i think about it, the more it seems that this seems to be more of a matter of differences in social culture. The US has a very specific deeply intertwined social structure which would make his project succeed but in Europe in general i don't think that would be the case.