“Dean Dad” argues against that old chestnut, a public service program whereby “graduating high school seniors will work for the government for a year or two in a sort of domestic peace corps arrangement, doing fine and worthy things while accruing voucher credits to be used for college tuition.”
In addition to being premised on an image of college students that hasn’t been true in decades, the impacts of delaying paid work on pensions, and the classist undertones of the suggestion, DD thinks the “service” itself isn’t so hot:
And there’s the sheer drudgery of much of the work. My recollection of high school — your mileage may vary — involves a lot of frustration, and a palpable eagerness to step up to the academic big leagues. Adding a year or two of soup-kitchen duty or trash pickup or helping old ladies across the street would be demotivating, to put it mildly. As the apocryphal saying goes, community service is something you’re sentenced to. Besides, the idea of interrupting your math sequence for a couple of years, then jumping right into calculus, strikes me as, well, nuts.
And, frankly, there are plenty of ways to serve your community once you’ve gone to school that are probably more productive.
Image: Diane Fernando via Google
