Mandatory volunteering doesn’t help, expert says

Requiring Ontario students to serve community isn’t education on its own, conference hears

Mandatory volunteering is an oxymoron, says a Canadian expert on teaching youngsters how to be good citizens.

All Ontario high school students are required to perform 40 hours of community service to graduate. But University of New Brunswick education professor Alan Sears doesn’t think that experience is necessarily building better citizens.

Volunteering should not be confused with civic education, he told a conference of about 300 parents, teachers and trustees in Toronto on Saturday.

“We should take citizenship seriously. It is not just being a nice person. Students need to understand the civic and political systems in which they work,” he said at the event organized by education advocacy group People for Education at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School.

The Star asked Sears about Ontario’s volunteering requirement. Here is an edited version of that conversation.

Doesn’t some volunteering do a social good?

Yes, it does. That’s why I’m reluctant to say no to kids volunteering. I just don’t want to force them. Volunteering does good. I’m not opposed to volunteering but I’m opposed to calling it civic education if we don’t add the educational component.

Is requiring students to volunteer in the community making them better citizens?

There’s all kinds of research on what makes for good community service learning in terms of civic education. It flows from what kids are studying in school, it includes civic and political components. If you work with seniors, for example, you understand there are policies about seniors, how are they formed, who forms them, how do people feel about them. The idea of community service learning is to connect people to the community and to learn about them, not just to serve. In Ontario the focus is all on service and not on learning. That’s the issue I have with it.

Do other provinces have a similar requirement to Ontario’s high school volunteer program?

I don’t know of any. A lot of provinc- es have leadership courses, especially within their physical education.

The British Columbia Civics Studies 11 is a course that focuses on how change is made in democratic societies. The students have to design a civic engagement project of their own, go out into the community and come back and reflect on it in the context of school. It’s all based on the learning of who holds power, how the power is exercised, what the issues are. That course, however, is not compulsory so isn’t taught widely.

Is there value in what Ontario is doing, essentially forcing high school kids to volunteer?

I’m opposed to forcing people to volunteer. I’m not opposed to requiring community engagement if it’s tied to real learning. In schools we teach a lot about formal politics and political advocacy. But most people find their civic engagement through volunteering and community service organizations or working with civil society organizations.