Students should complete a community service requirement to graduate from high school.

I am going to present my contentions (points) and then refute what my opponent has said. C1: Required community service violates human rights. Now, let me explain how this works. So, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, we have compulsory education in most of the U. S. ’ states, meaning you have to attend school for a certain amount of time. If there were to be required community service, this would mean that students would have to do community service (because they have to go to school). Now imagine you are a student who doesn’t want to do this community service, but where you live there is compulsory education, and there is also required community service, so you have to. This is called involuntary servitude; you don’t want to do these services, but you must. Now let’s take a look at Constitution, the document in which our country was founded upon. In section one of the 13th amendment, it says “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. ” I think you all can now understand why this violates human rights - required community service is legally slavery, as stated in the 13th amendment. I don’t think we need to explain in depth about the impact of the violation of humans rights caused by required community service, because it’s pretty similar to original slavery. It degrades and exploits students, it threatens students by taking away one of the biggest parts of their early lives if they don’t do what they’re told, and it overall increases unhappiness within the school environment. So not only would this a violation of the constitution as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it is also just in general a horrible way to try and get students to contribute. C2: Putting a requirement on community service does the opposite of it’s intended purpose. Sure, putting a requirement on community service may help students do more of it at first, but in the long term the requirement actually makes high schoolers less likely to do service. In Maryland, a study was done by the organization Economics by Education Review, and was led by Sara E. Helms, an assistant professor at Samford University. The study looked over required community service in Maryland, and found that it actually decreased volunteering among older students, leading to a loss in long term volunteering. "If this is for school, how do we know [students] are considering this as community service, rather than just homework for school? " says Helms. "We are substituting this [requirement] for being self-motivated. ” So in reality, students are less likely to volunteer in high school if it is required, as well as being less likely to volunteer in later life because they see it as some form on homework. Now I am going to refute what my opponent has said, which is that community service can make us feel better about ourselves and happier in general. Before I say my responses I would like to say that I agree that community service is beneficial, but putting a requirement on it for high schoolers is not the way to go. So now on to my responses, I have two:First, community service by itself may make us feel joyful, but making it required completely takes the joy out of it. As I explained in my contention 1, required community service in high school is legally slavery in many states of the U. S. Do you think that these students who don't have time to do community service because they have other things to do (like working) are going to be happy when they can't graduate because they were trying to feed themselves and their family? Second, when it is forced, community service does two things - it takes the meaning out of it (you feel like you are being made to do this, not that you chose to help society), and it actually reduces the amount of service done, as I explained in contention 2. Also, when it is not self-motivated, students often have bad experiences with community service, meaning theythey won't do it in their later lives because they don't feel good about doing it anymore. So I hope you all are convinced that required community service for high schoolers to graduate is much more detrimental than beneficial. Remember this - as I have proven in this speech, required community service is a dillemna for students: meaningless if they do it, destructive if they don't.