Not long before the Matthew Nisbet post about uncharitable atheists crossed my RSS feeds, I had marked a Fred Clark post about mission trips that has some really good thoughts about the mechanics of charity:
But the point of these mission trips is not only to get [a rural school in Haiti] built. That’s part of it, but it’s not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. The problem with the calculus above is that it presumes that the total level of contribution is a constant. That assumption is probably not true. It’s unlikely that the youth group, the church, or any other given community here would raise the same amount of money without the personal stake of the trip itself.
The purpose of the mission trip is not exclusively to change the Haitian community where the school is to be built. Part of the purpose of the trip is also to change the young Americans who are going there, and to change the community that sends them. Part of the reason for such trips is to nurture a sense of empathy, of solidarity, and an ethos of service — to create and maintain the capacity to care whether or not children in Haiti have a decent place to go to school, and to create and maintain the desire to help.
His post was motivated by Sen. Chris Dodd’s proposal of a national service plan, and he has some good comments about that as well:
I’m still not completely sure what to think about Dodd’s idea of mandatory service as a requirement for high school graduation. I get the impulse — a self-absorbed little prick really shouldn’t be handed a diploma and declared “educated” until someone has pointed out to him that he shouldn’t be such a self-absorbed little prick. And the idea of mandatory service for high school students begins to look more attractive the more you listen to the whining of its most vocal opponents. Yet for all of that “mandatory service” still seems like an oxymoron.
This “mandatory service” business is an idea that has started to gain a surprising amount of traction, even among liberal academics.
The other day at lunch, a colleague suggested that it would be good to put an age limit on college enrollment– no students would be accepted before the age of 20, and they would be expected to spend the two-ish years between high school and college doing some sort of service work. It has a certain amount of promise– those two years could increase the maturity level of our students quite a bit, and if you coupled it with a lowering of the drinking age to 20, you could wipe out a lot of other problems as well.
Still, I’m not sure I buy the concept, for more or less the same reasons that Fred gives. “Mandatory service” seems inherently contradictory. A big part of the benefit of community service work is supposed to come from personal fulfillment and spiritual betterment, and I’m not sure you really get that if people are forced to serve.
Then again, I don’t know anything about mandatory service, having been born late enough that the military draft was unthinkable by the time I hit high school. I know I have some readers from countries with mandatory military service, though– do you have any thoughts on the issue?
It should also be noted that while community service is not a formal requirement for graduation, for students headed to a certain level of elite colleges and universities, it’s moving onto the list of de facto requirements for college admissions. My impression is that most of our entering students have done at least some sort of community service activity in high school, as application padding if nothing else. I’m not connected enough with either admissions or campus community service organizations to be able to assess the sincerity of their committment to service, though, but it would probably be interesting to look at those students, and might provide some useful data in discussing the idea of mandatory service.