- [Instructor] When
you think about service
in the United States, what do you imagine?
Most people immediately
think of military service,
serving in one of the
branches of the Armed Forces
like the Army or the Air Force,
and military service is an
important form of service,
but it's not the only
kind of national service.
National service includes
all of the voluntary
or compulsory ways in which people serve
their local communities,
their state, or their nation.
In addition to military service,
there is also civilian service.
This involves serving in institutions
that benefit the United
States or other countries,
but are not part of the military.
Some examples include AmeriCorps programs,
which send volunteers to
help with rebuilding parks,
tutoring kids, or alleviating
hunger and poverty,
among other things,
Teach for America, which sends
outstanding college graduates
to serve as teachers
in low income schools,
Youth Build, which teaches
construction skills
to unemployed young people
and helps them earn
their high school diploma
if they haven't already,
and there's the Peace Corps,
which sends Americans to promote social
and economic development abroad.
Service in the United States is voluntary.
Today, the U.S. Armed
Forces are composed entirely
of people who volunteered to serve
rather than people who were drafted.
That wasn't always the case.
From 1940 to 1973,
the United States had a
compulsory military draft
to fill vacancies in the Armed Services
that couldn't be filled
by volunteer means.
After the Vietnam War,
compulsory military service was suspended,
but men and people assigned male at birth
are still required to
register for selective service
from ages 18 to 25
as a standby in the event
that a draft is re-instituted.
Other countries do have
national service requirements.
Israel mandates that all
citizens over the age of 18
serve in the military for two years.
In South Korea, men between
the ages of 16 and 38
are required to serve in the military
for at least 18 months,
and effective in 2021,
French citizens between 16 and 25
will have to participate in a month
of universal national service:
living in barracks, wearing uniforms,
and learning about French
culture, civics and volunteering,
and they won't be allowed
to bring their cell phones with them.
Some American politicians have proposed
creating a national public service program
in the United States with one or two years
of mandated national service for Americans
between the ages of 18 and 25.
They've argued that it would
help diffuse partisanship
by bringing people with ideologies
together for a common purpose,
and that it would save
the government money
by making use of
volunteers for some labor.
Opponents of the idea have argued
that mandating service
would be a violation
of individual liberty,
and that it's unnecessary
to force people to do it,
because so many people already volunteer.
So what do you think?
Should there be a
mandatory national service
in the United States?
