An extracurricular activity by nature is designed to be optional, something that students can join to support their hobby. Sports are a popular example, because if you are enrolled in the school, you don't have to spend extra money to join a sports team. This is great news for the people interested in all the sports their school has to offer. But not everyone wants to join the sports team. Even if you take into account all the other extracurricular activities at school, there will still be people who aren't interested in any of them, and it would be impossible to cover all categories and hobbies of every student at school to make an activity for each of them. This is why I believe the ability to opt out of an extracurricular activity is a fundamental part of the activity itself, hence the "extra" in the name, and I'm going to tell you why forcing students to participate in one is a very bad idea.

Let's say for this example we single out one particular student, and this student's name is Generic_Name. Let's also say that Generic_Name has a hobby of creating and collecting model airplanes, to display on the shelf of his room. Generic_Name's hobby isn't a very common one, but that's okay. He prefers to build them alone, in the quiet of his room, and maybe share pictures of them online with another small group of model airplane enthusiasts. Generic_Name chooses to spend most of his free time doing this, and he enjoys it. Unless he can't, because the school just made that choice for him, and now Generic_Name has to sign up for an extracurricular activity. Generic_Name's school doesn't have a model airplane building club, as most schools don't, so Generic_Name is forced to spend his free time doing something he doesn't enjoy. He barely has any time to invest into his real hobby anymore, since he has to spend all afternoon at the chess club. As his happiness plummets, so do his grades. The school has nothing to really gain, and certainly a lot to lose, by implementing this system.

This leads me to my next point, which is also a question. What does the school gain by putting this rule in place? What benefits does the school get by forcing each and every student to participate in an extracurricular activity? Are they not taking into account the amount of protests to this rule, or the amount of students who will skip the extracurricular activity anyway? What could make them want to introduce this rule so badly, that they would ignore all of the negative consequences that come with it? There is no reason that I can think of that could support this rule even being thought of. A rule like not being allowed to chew gum at school, while pretty silly, still has a reason. It's so that students won't stick their chewed gum underneath the table, and while I would never do something like that, I still completely understand and can get behind this rule. This is in stark contrast to a rule like forcing students to participate in an extracurricular activity, where I couldn't think of a single reason for it's existence.

All in all, I think adding this rule to any school would only lead to disaster. It only brings negative consequences to both involved parties, and if there are any schools already with this rule, they would most certainly be better off without it. There isn't a single reason I can think of for a rule like this to be made. These are all the reasons why I think forcing students to participate in an extracurricular activity is a very bad idea.