Mandatory Service Hours

Mandatory service hours is a controversial issue among many Americans and politicians. Even though fifty-seven percent of Americans oppose any type of requirement, politicians still push it through. It is required to complete at least 40 hours of forced community service in several states across the United States. Mandatory service hours, are disliked among the people who have to do them, teenagers. Despite not many students doing service hours when required, many teens do service hours after tragedies. Also, many of the teenagers resort to activism to get their point across to the government that they do not want to do them. Except many more illegal and unjust occurrences have happened due to the politicians being unreasonable. Some students

Which means that students, forge the hours they have not done to pass.This is a very serious problem among young people because not only is it illegal to forge documents, but it shows that the mandatory hours are too much. This is because if service hours were not mandatory than the forgery of hours would not occur. In addition, students regularly participate in extracurricular activities which takes up most of the day. Completing these activities, makes completing service hours extremely difficult. Also, with the added bonus of doing mandatory service hours to get into college, it is no wonder why many students tend to plagiarize their service hours. Most kids do not look at service hours as a way to give back to the community, they see it as something to get done. It is like having a checklist to go through to get into college. Teenagers must have several years of English, history, electives, language and then service hours. Many students see service hours as an unwanted requirement. The purpose of having service hours is to do it out of goodwill, like acts of kindness one can give to another. An example of teenagers in particular serving the community out of goodwill is shortly after the 9/11 attacks(Kenny and Gallagher 128). These students took part in distributing goods and other services. At that time, President Bush was glad that students took part in volunteerism. The national

Many high schools students admitted to Yale or Harvard did not receive a high school diploma because they did not complete the absurd amount of service hours required. This has also reached the point where students have protested mandatory service hours. All of their attempts proved futile against the unjust judges. Even though volunteering your time to the community is good, many of these protests outside courtrooms and city halls turn into activism and even in major cases, riots (Marcovitz). Even when the going gets tough, violators of the 13th amendment still call this unworthy and unprecedented. Except to them it is not clear of the current situation because if teenagers enjoyed doing the mandatory hours, than their would be no riots. A board member of Maryland, Robert Thompson stated, “What one does after high school graduation is up to the individual. He can give up reading books forever if he chooses, as indeed many persons do. He can similarly abandon any sustained or constructive attention to the community in favor of purely private pursuits as do many others. But the schools will at least have enunciated what I consider responsible educational priorities”(Winerip). Roberts statement is clear and concise but does not answer the questions asked. This is another reason why teenagers were getting very angry, because the adults shrouded the answers they are looking