• Flames5123@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

        • Flames5123@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          But he keeps going. Freely. So it is volunteering now. The first 15 hours was not volunteering by definition, but it is afterwards.

        • shneancy@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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

            • shneancy@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              genuinely, how old are you?

              if your child doesn’t want to brush their teeth, are you going to insist that their personal freedom is the most important thing and let their dental hygiene suffer? that forcing them to brush their teeth is somehow slavery? (as small as it is, it is work after all)

              it’s 15h a semester, a kid can do ~1h of helping out around the neighbourhood a week and pass easily. oh no! a child is being made to help people for an hour a week! learning the benefits of helping and gaining experience doing small tasks! literally slavery!

              you gotta touch some grass buddy, smell the flowers, talk with parents, talk with teachers, relax

                • shneancy@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  then go ask an ethics board of your nearby university their opinion, see how many people actually agree with your overtly exaggerated understanding of “child slavery”. because holy shit man, i’m a leftist, so far left i’m an anarchist, i’m all for freedom and consent, and even by my standards what you’re saying is just– wild

        • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          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.

    • Xenny@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • cepelinas@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • gerryflap@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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        2 months ago

        They only call it volunteering because they don’t want to pay for the work.

        Volunteering should be … voluntary