• Flames5123@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month 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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          1 month ago

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

                • 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 month ago

                  Bro, the reason the school calls them “volunteer hours” is because the places that need help are asking for volunteers. Even though it’s mandatory for students, these are hours at a volunteering opportunity. Interacting with the community is part of growing up, and part of their education. It’s not slavery.

                • shneancy@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  maybe if you did yours you’d understand that “and” means both conditions need to be fulfilled for a statement to be true. so how is that child considered a property of anyone in this situation?

        • shneancy@lemmy.world
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          1 month 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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              1 month 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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                  1 month 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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          1 month 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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      1 month 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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      1 month 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.

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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          1 month ago

          I didn’t say that it meets the definition of “volunteer”.

            • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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              1 month ago

              I’m not. I really don’t know how you’re reading that into my comment, where the first half literally expresses my worry about this being child labor. I’m not going to argue for a position I don’t hold.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      1 month 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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      1 month 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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      1 month 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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        1 month ago

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

        Volunteering should be … voluntary