this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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If it’s required, then it isn’t volunteering.
Yes and no. For kids doing it, it’s more “community service” but for this kid, he keeps going so it turns into a love of volunteering.
The word “volunteer” is literally defined as a person who freely offers to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task.
If it’s required, then it is not, by definition, “freely given“, and, thus, not volunteering.
This isn’t an argument of degrees. It is literally not volunteering according to the definition of the word volunteering.
What this article describes his literal slavery.
And if this kid enjoys himself around the cat, that’s because cats are awesome, not because he was forced to labor without compensation.
But he keeps going. Freely. So it is volunteering now. The first 15 hours was not volunteering by definition, but it is afterwards.
it's to teach children (and their parents) how to volunteer and where, by assigning public service to the kids. it's not called public service because volunteering is what it will be once the teaching is done, it's avoiding confusion of teaching something that is called another word after you finish school
i think you might be overreacting a little bit
My dude it’s typically called service learning and your pessimistic and overly pedantic take on it isn’t great.
The notion of these activities is to get kids out in the world to see how it works and interact with its systems AND possibly have them help out and learn about things.
When I was in school I did my service learning with a nature conservancy near me, it was fun and was treated like a school assignment.
They’re not slaves and your comparison is wild for anyone living in any form of servitude.
There's a term for that, it's called being voluntold to do something.
I get volunteered for shit at work all the time.
Yeah hated this shit in school. What they don't tell you is when you unleash all the kids in the highschools at the same fucking time to get 40 hours of volunteer hours during the same couple months the opportunities for volunteering get severely limited. Worse if you're in a smaller city/town
School should provide the opportunities if needed yo alleviate demand
Yeah, at first I thought this would be a case of !orphancrushing@lemmy.world. Like, good news everyone, this kid actually enjoys his child labor.
But I guess, at just 15 hours per semester and if it is relatively fun activities like this, then I can see that it's actually educational and might prevent the dissociation that students often experience.
Then it should be called community service or something.
I agree, but I still think they should call it that. For some kids, it'll build a passion for volunteer work and then they will choose to do it. If you call it something else then that might not happen as often.
Calm down Che Guevara. Better things to be upset about than getting kids involved in their local communities.
Nobody made this claim. Are you replying to the correct comment?
I'm replying to the right one.
Then you’re hallucinating, because I never said anything like what you’re accusing me of. Not even close.
Then again, most people replying to my comment have severe deficiencies in both vocabulary and reading comprehension, so this doesn’t surprise me.
Best of luck with that!
Yep. Definitely the correct one.
Just because there are other things doesn't mean we can't be upset about "mandatory volunteering" which is an oxymoron.
I mean, just look at you. Getting upset about some opinion online. You sure you aren't the Che Guevara?
Awe dude
Had this at my school, if it is fun you don't get any of this thing we called it social hours,, it is basically just a way to get kids to work.
True, but it's still work that's usually volunteering work. So it's probably a good idea to call it volunteering so the kids associate it with that. It's to give kids a taste of what kind of work volunteers do so they might do it voluntarily in the future (like the kid in this post).
Personally I also didn't really mind it in school. I had to spend a few days at a thrift store and had lots of fun. They installed Ubuntu on their laptops, which was my first contact with Linux. I got to help customers with that. And one time we were moving a couch and accidentally hit a stand that wasn't attached properly. It fell over and almost hit a customer lol.
They only call it volunteering because they don't want to pay for the work.
Volunteering should be ... voluntary