Citizen Competence

I found the McAdam and Brand article, "Assessing the Effects of Voluntary Youth Service: The Case of Teach For America", to be very interesting. Incredibly, it finds that our presumptions of the benefits for youth community service are actually wrong. The authors find that youth service does not actually increase service into adulthood. The authors found that those young professionals who were part of the Teach For America program for two years were actually less likely to be involved in civic groups. The most noticeable reason cited for the decrease in civic engagement was that graduates of the program had felt that their own actions were futile, and the program itself was failing. Is this type of cynicism visible in other forms of civic participation? In other words, is TFA an outlier, in that TFA requires a very extensive commitment than most forms of civic engagement.

I remember that there were a few people in class, whose high schools required mandatory volunteer hours. According to the article, early volunteering does not necessarily increase civic engagement in later years. In fact, civic engagement can develop bad habits. For one, they can make a citizen feel too small to create change, resulting in less participation. Similarly, civic engagement can encourage a"bake sale" effect. Volunteers instead of attacking or focusing on the problem, will participate in bake sales or organize events to raise money. In essence, no policy is being changed and there is a decrease in political participation. Is it possible to separate civic engagement from the political sphere? What are the possible solutions to increasing political activism through civic engagement?