| Research resources on national youth service |
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About global conferences on national youth service (nys)
(Note: update: to date, 48 countries have attended; March 2003). The three Global Conferences have been a rich source of information about the history of NYS and its status late in the 20th Century. Descriptions and outcomes of selected programs are given below. More details may be found in the conference reports. NYS in the 20th CenturyIndonesia has had a succession of youth service programs since it achieved independence in 1950. Indonesia's youth service grew out of its war of independence in the late 1940s. Those soldiers who were educated taught school when they were not fighting. They saw the difference of lifestyles and standards of living between life in the villages and life in the cities. They saw potential danger in the sharp contrast between the urban rich and the rural poor. So they wanted future leaders to get acquainted with life in the villages just as they had done as guerrillas. But instead of guns, they wanted them to carry books and pencils and work on projects like literacy, public health, clean water supplies and agriculture. The programs have evolved over the years according to need. Beginning in 1950, Indonesia's youth service provided school teachers for secondary schools and teacher training colleges. By 1963, these institutions were producing enough teachers so Indonesia shifted gears. The government called on university juniors to work in the countryside for six months in their respective fields - whether engineering or agriculture or literacy - and integrate study with service. Now they are exploring the promotion of entrepreneurs at the village level. The continuing theme is to place university students in a village for a period of time. There they do something useful, and come to understand village life. Although evaluation of the Indonesian study-service programs has been limited, it is clear that the students make a distinct contribution to village life and that they come to appreciate life in the village. A student who had recently completed service in KKN - as it is named - told me a few years ago, "Before KKN I was proud, now I feel smaller [more humble]." Germany's post-war constitution states: "No one shall be forced to do war service with arms against his conscience." This provision led to alternative service for conscientious objectors (COs) when conscription was introduced in the late 1950s. CO applicants had to appear before a panel and try to convince members that they were genuine COs. Only a handful of young men became COs. In the 1980s, West Germany decided that the CO process discriminated in favor of the better educated class and took a number of measures to correct the situation. Today, a young man only needs to sign a paper saying he is a CO. Then he will be assigned to alternative civilian service instead of military service. For all practical purposes, they are opting to do 15 months of civilian service instead of 12 months of military service. At any one time, 130,000 young men are performing civilian service as an alternative to military service. The German national service most nearly embodies the concept of a moral equivalent of war, as NYS is often characterized. As the number of young men performing civilian national service at any one time has risen from a few thousand in the 1960s to 130,000 in the mid-1990s, and as a larger percentage of the public has become familiar with the work of the COs, the public attitude has shifted from negative - viewing COs as deviants and draft-dodgers - to positive. The account of a CO's parent helps to explain why this attitude has changed: I have a son who is doing his service in the sick ward of an old people's home ... I asked him how many deaths he actually had witnessed during his one-and-a-half years of civilian service. He told me that he could no longer count them; but, on an average, there were more than one every month. And you must bear in mind what it means to a young person who has just graduated from secondary school to take care of old people - to wash and feed them, make their beds, care for them, help them up when they have fallen down and are bleeding, go for help when one of them has a stroke - and then, at the end, watch the people, with whom he has just established contact, die. I ask myself the meaning of such arguments as the one that "military service is a greater strain," and I wonder what justification there actually is for making conscientious objectors do service for a period of time that is one-third longer than military service. (From Dr. Jurgen Kuhlmann's account of Zivildienst in Eberly and Sherraden, eds., 'The Moral Equivalent of War?' , pp. 147-148, cited in the biblography on nys.) Now Germany faces a dilemma. The Cold War has ended and the military manpower pool has increased as a result of the unification of West and East Germany. There is no longer a need for conscription. But the young men in civilian service have become a vital part of the delivery of social services, especially to old folks. Some Germans believe the government is stalling on moving toward an all-volunteer military force because civilian national service would collapse along with it. One option under consideration is to create both a volunteer military and a volunteer NYS and encourage young men and women to choose one of these services. Nigeria's National Youth Service Corps grew out of the Civil War of the 1960s when one part of Nigeria - called Biafra - tried to break away from the rest of Nigeria. The attempted breakaway can be traced directly to the fact that Nigeria is not a natural country. Its borders were drawn by the European powers meeting in Berlin more than a century ago. They broke up people of common language and culture, and they forced together into one country people of different cultures. Biafra failed in its effort to secede but Nigeria decided it must make efforts to foster national unity. The National Youth Service Corps is perhaps the most notable example. It requires all university graduates to serve for one year in a different part of the country from where they grew up. They serve in their professional areas. Agricultural graduates advise farmers on crops and pesticides while English majors teach high school English. The government provides stipends for them. In Costa Rica, university students and their professors are required to work on problem-solving activities in needy communities. They serve for several months in areas such as public health, science programs, legal assistance, and heritage programs that help preserve the traditional values of the region. Professors and students work together in order to maximize the quality of services rendered, and to maximize the learning outcomes of the experience. All projects are interdisciplinary, and must be approved in advance by the University's Social Action Office. During the course of a year, about 2,000 students are involved in 100 different projects. In Botswana, high school students who are going on to university serve for a year - often in remote villages - living with local families and working on such areas as health and education. The students keep daily diaries. They meet about once a month with national service officials to review both their service activities and their learning experiences. The students help some of the poorest areas and become acquainted with the needs of villagers. Then, when they have their degrees and become important officials in business or government, they will be more inclined to develop the nation in a way consistent with the needs of the villagers. For several decades, China has used military conscripts for public works projects, and has used the bait of jobs and housing to attract young people to volunteer for community service projects. Now the system appears to be opening up somewhat. Through the Chinese Young Volunteers Association (CYVA), established in 1994, young volunteers are individually linked with retired persons in a program known as "one-on-one." The All-China Youth Federation reports that in 1996 young volunteers, who number in the hundreds of thousands, were encouraged to contribute at east 48 hours of voluntary service each year. In the United States for the past 60 years, the record of national service has looked like a roller coaster. The peak years were in the 1930s, when a total of three million young men served with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The CCC was initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt to alleviate high levels of unemployment and to do important conservation work. It succeeded in both. According to the Gallup Opinion Poll, the CCC was supported by nearly 90 percent of the population. Even the Republicans liked it. In 1941, President Roosevelt and Congressman Lyndon Johnson began an effort to make the CCC permanent. It would have been called the Civilian Youth Administration. But then the United States entered World War II, and that brought a swift end to the CCC. The next peak year for national service was 1961, when President Kennedy initiated the Peace Corps. It had received enormous support on university campuses when Kennedy proposed the Peace Corps in the 1960 campaign. Much of that support was because Kennedy had said he would consider making Peace Corps service equivalent to what was then a required military service. However, he backed away from that idea because he felt the draft was too hot an issue. There were two small highs for national service in the 1970s: a test project in Seattle yielded these important findings about national service: * The value of services performed by young people was double the cost of the program. * Participants advanced up career ladders twice as much as the norm. * The unemployment rate of participants fell from 70% before service to 18% after service. * Participants gained significantly increased awareness of the needs of others. The second high in the 1970s was a revival of the old CCC by President Carter. It was, however, a revival in miniature, enrolling only 20,000 young people a year as compared with 500,000 a year in the CCC. The 1980s was mostly downhill as President Reagan abolished the CCC revival. Several cities and states initiated local conservation and community service programs, but enrollments were small. Indeed, throughout the 1980s, the number of 18 to 24 year olds in the Peace Corps, its domestic equivalent known as VISTA, and the city and state programs, averaged only about 8,000. President Clinton's national service of 1993 gave the USA the highest peak since the days of the CCC. It provided $1.5 billion over three years to support a variety of service activities with an emphasis on full-time service by young adults. Mr. Clinton had wanted to make it possible for every American who wanted to pursue higher education, to obtain support for it from a year or two in national service. Congress gave him only a fraction of the money he requested, but it was enough to increase the number of young people in full-time civilian service from its 8,000 level of the 80s to about 35,000 in 1996. An interesting feature of the Clinton program is that the national service can be done either before or after university education. It is, in some respects, a combination of the programs in Botswana and Nigeria, although in the United States it is voluntary and reaches only a small percentage of those eligible. The Clinton plan is decentralized, with most of the administration handled by cities and states and NGOs. Future plansThose of us who attended the Papua New Guinea Conference learned of additional plans for NYS that are on the drawing board or just getting under way. We learned from Brig. General Joann Swanepohl, Dr. John Lamola, and National Youth Commissioner Otto B Kunene about South Africa's National Service Corps. South Africa created a service corps in 1995 to train the thousands of soldiers being demobilized for civilian work. In 1996, it initiated planning for a National Service Corps that is to build on the military service corps model and is to take in unemployed young people for a period of training followed by up to one year of public service work. The first entrants into this civilian National Service Corps are scheduled for 1997. We learned from Dr. Reuven Gal of Israel's Carmel Institute for Social Studies about the proposal for a Civic Youth Service that would engage substantial numbers of young Jews and Arabs serving together on public service projects. The proposal does not at this stage have governmental support but is being actively pursued and surveys show it has substantial public support, especially among young people. We learned from Ms. Gwen Goff of Australia about the government's plan for the Green Corps, to which the government has pledged $A41.6 million over the next three years to enable 17 to 20 years old to help restore Australia's natural environment and cultural heritage. We learned from Mrs. Elisabeth Hoodless of Britain's Community Service Volunteers about Labor leader Tony Blair's promise - if the Labor Party comes to power in the 1997 election - to have 100,000 Citizens Service volunteers in the field by 2000. LessonsNow, what can be concluded from this brief tour of NYS schemes around the world? As one who did both military and civilian service in the 1950s and has been a student of NYS ever since, I have found that adherence to the following ten points will almost certainly lead to a properly-conceived and properly organized program of NYS.
Prospects for the 21st CenturyTwentieth century research and experience with NYS has taught us many lessons about NYS, but there is still much to learn and new ground to explore. Too often, NYS has been introduced as a temporary measure with little thought given to its implications and to its long-term potential. The consequence is poorly conceived and poorly organized NYS programs that lead some observers to the erroneous conclusion that NYS is a bad idea. In such an environment, the frequent successes of NYS testify to the inherent strength of the concept. The founders of the International Association for NYS anticipate that it will help NYS program planners and program officials to become familiar with the larger picture and thereby make sensible decisions for their respective efforts. Looking ahead, I can see four themes that will go far to determine the future course of NYS. These themes are NYS and military service, the work of NYS, NYS as an institution, and NYS as global service. NYS and military serviceConscription for military service has been on the decline in recent decades and there appears to be little sentiment for its return. However, it is worth noting that the NYS programs in countries such as Indonesia, Germany and South Africa have evolved in various ways from the military; and NYS proposals in the USA, Israel, and India (see Chibber citation in the bibliography on national youth service) have been strongly influenced by the military. The military connection with NYS cannot be summarily dismissed. Costa Rica abolished its armed forces in 1948 but few countries have followed suit. Conscription may be on the way out but the military is not. It is young men - and increasingly young women as well - who make up the bulk of any military force. They are the same age group as those who join NYS. Here are three aspects of the NYS-military connection that cannot be overlooked.
It seems important to keep alive some form of linkage between military service and NYS. One way to do this would be to encourage young men and women to participate in a three-month basic training that could be a feeder for both NYS and the military. Young people would have physical and mental and aptitude testing; they would go on long route marches; they would participate in short-term service projects; they would be informed of both military and civilian service opportunities. Upon completion of basic training, they could enter NYS or the military, or choose neither of them. The work of nysThis theme consists of two closely related dilemmas. First, how can NYS participants provide services that are useful to others and challenging to themselves without replacing paid workers? Second, how can the private sector and/or governments provide the ever-increasing demand for services - especially in such areas as elder care and child care - from a populace made up of one group of citizens who cannot afford to pay for the services and another group who does not want to pay the taxes for them? I recall an incident from the Seattle NYS experiment mentioned earlier. The father of a teenage applicant for NYS came to the office in a rather hostile mood. He had read the literature his son had received and recognized that a year of full-time service would be a good experience for his son. However, as a labor union member, he was concerned that NYS was intended to replace paid workers. We had a long talk during which I pointed out the safeguards, such as the opportunity for unions, business people and others, to challenge the prospective placements of NYS participants. On leaving, he said that he approved of the program - so long as we maintained our safeguards - as it would give his son and others valuable work experience. It was quite a different scene in Washington, D.C. Whenever a national service bill seemed to have a chance of passing Congress, the labor union lobbyists demanded all kinds of regulations to prevent the replacement of paid workers. As a result, a number of challenging assignments that might have been open to NYS participants, as they had been in Seattle, were closed to them. A related but larger issue is how governments will deliver all the services demanded by their constituents. In industrial societies, the demand for good quality elder care, child care, and environmental protection exceeds what the government is prepared to supply. A similar trend is now found in developing countries as well. Representatives from several Pacific Island nations at the 1996 Papua New Guinea Conference described how the church and families traditionally looked after children and old folks. Yet in recent years, more and more people were falling outside the traditional safety net. Large-scale NYS may be the answer to the twin dilemmas. Societies in the 21st Century may decide that the provision of human and environmental services is as important as military service was seen to be in the 20th Century. Countries have been quite willing to draft young men and pay them subsistence wages as members of the armed forces. One would hope that forced conscription would not be necessary, that young people would see NYS as their public duty and come forward for a year or two of NYS. Countries that meet their responsibilities to young people can expect to see the favor returned. NYS as an institutionAn extrapolation of current trends suggests that NYS may become a societal institution in the 21st Century. On the one hand, the traditional avenues for adolescents to move into adulthood - school, work, military service, marriage - are not there or are not working for increasingly large numbers of young people. A study of the indicators in almost any country will reveal increasing rates of youth crime, youth unemployment, substance abuse by young people, and single parenthood. On the other hand, the need for the kinds of services young people can provide are also increasing. In addition to elder care, child care and environmental protection, there are needs in such areas of literacy, public health, education, recreation, and youth work. One important branch of NYS appears to be on the road to becoming an institution in several countries. We have already noted the various forms of service-learning that may be found in Indonesia, Costa Rica, Nigeria, and Botswana. Service-learning, in which one's learning informs one's service and one's service informs one's learning, is mandatory for all secondary level students in several American cities. In some cases, students are required to perform 75 hours of community service and to write a report on what they learned from the experience. In others, students apply classroom knowledge to particular service projects. As examples, chemistry students regularly check air and water pollution levels and publicize the results; history students visit elderly residents of nursing homes and record their impressions of wars and depressions and other events of half a century ago. Community Service Volunteers in the UK has published a series of curricular guides that many schools use to integrate community service with classroom studies. Most young people involved in service-learning are students who serve no more than a few hours a week and do not receive stipends. Thus, a large number of young people can participate at fairly low cost, the major expenditure being the pay of a service-learning coordinator who sees to it that the interests of students, teachers, and community service organizations are met in the service-learning project. The transition to NYS as an institution will not be easy. Its unit costs are higher than service-learning because food, housing, and a small stipend are required for persons in full-time service. Its relationship to education, to employment, to the military, to service providers, will have to be carefully worked out. The International Association for NYS provides a forum for consideration of these issues. NYS as global serviceThe 20th Century has seen a number of beginnings for the kind of Planetary Service envisioned by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy early in the century. In the aftermath of World War I, university students and others volunteered to go overseas for a few months to do rehabilitation work in war-devastated areas of Europe. These efforts, now facilitated by the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Services, have continued and spread to other areas of the world where short-term volunteers serve as needed. The British Voluntary Service Overseas, the American Peace Corps, and the Canadian University Service Overseas each began about 1960 with an emphasis on young people serving in developing nations for a year or two. Their most successful projects were in the field of education, as recent university graduates taught English, maths, sciences, and other subjects, usually at the secondary level. Less successful were attempts at village development, where the overseas visitors simply did not know enough about local customs to be of much help. These one-way service projects continue, although they have tended to recruit older participants with specialized skills. The same is true of the United Nations Volunteers, founded in 1971, which typically engages mid-career civil servants to work in foreign countries. A few attempts have been made at genuinely bilateral service projects. In 1989, the National Service Secretariat of the USA and the Committee of Youth Organizations of the USSR agreed to initiate service projects where teams of young people from each country would work side by side, first in one country and then in the other. Called the Soviet-American Youth Service, it saw the participation of about 100 Russians and Americans in 1990 and 1991, then ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Several avenues seem to be ripe for development in the 21st Century, all of which can be facilitated by the International Association for NYS.
'National youth service in the 20th and 21st Centuries', by Don Eberly; essay prepared for the 4th Global Conference on National Youth Service held at Windsor Castle, United Kingdom, June 1998. | |||||||||||||||