National service isn't the answer. AIBU?

Ageist generalisation.

🙄
Yes, it it's extreme form, it COULD be these things. But maybe, just maybe, the young person doing the actual teaching isn't a colonialist moron and has, you know, an open and enquiring, respectful mind?!

Ummm ... different perspective on life? The chance to broaden his mind by being exposed to a different culture at the same time as gaining work experience and learning how fantastic the People of Peru are?! ..... of course Peruvians can teach themselves but that's not the point! I gained so much learning French from a French young person who taught me for a year as a teenager....it just is a good thing

So poverty tourism and a nice little ego boost for him.
Volunteering is great. Stuff like this is not.

So poverty tourism and a nice little ego boost for him.
Volunteering is great. Stuff like this is not.

Hilarious - and, how, pray would you imagine we could compel these pillars of society to participate in your forced labour scheme?

Many countries that we look up to in terms of their child rearing have national service.
It’s not always military.
But, the reason is works is the same reason their child rearing seems to work, they have a completely different mind set to us.
They are much more concerned with how they can be an active and positively contributing member of society. They don’t expect society to solely cater to them.

He's volunteering with an organisation helping with literacy in schools.

My cousins in Germany loved it. There, you can do a year in the army or a year volunteering. One ended up in an army skiing unit, one ended up doing the army raido service and one chose to volunteer in a hospital which enabled her to go on to study the degree she wanted to study. My other cousins didn't want to do it but now wish they had.

In the UK we basically already have national voluntary service, just only for those who can afford a gap year or unpaid internships.
If organised right it is a fab idea. Even if unpaid you could offer bed and board and loads of ppl would do it.

They've run out of ideas and it appeals to their voter base ' in my day blah blah blah' ' whilst forgetting that they didn't actually fight in the war and the young in their day were either hippies experimenting with psychedelics and free love or punks who believed in anarchy

i say no because we don’t need another workhouse

I'm not sure how the decisions that my own and several other generation have made that have led to poor opportunities and a difficult future can be blamed on the young.

@Needmorelego you're shouting into a void here, as with every recent thread about the NCS scheme which already exists and is nothing to do with uniforms.

They aren't hearing you. Too frothing at the mouth about how awful old people are.

I wrote my dissertation on National (military) Service, and one of my students is currently volunteering in Peru on the international wing of the NCS scheme.

No. Invest the money in training the teens that slipped through the net. Build their skills, feeling of self-worth and esteem and ensure they develop into decent, tax paying citizens. Leave the ones that are set up alone to get on with their lives.

Judging by some of the rough young lads where I live, something compulsory, structured and productive would be a good thing. I don't believe in forced military service but a lot of the of them would probably be happier if they weren't just doing drugs, getting drunk every night and getting into trouble with the police.

I think you are being unreasonable for portraying the Tory thing as "National Service" when it's more NCS-lite - two weeks (maybe four) of worthy activities.

I think their idea is crap, and would rather effort was put into publicising and encouraging participation in NCS.

But think it's wrong to draw a false comparison to the older military version

In some countries it's a year where you can choose between various options, many of them community or social type options. So you might end up doing street cleaning or elderly care. I don't think that's actually a bad thing, and wouldn't mind doing it myself either, depending on how it's set up.

I don't think anybody should be forced into armed forces. Absolutely not.

Don’t work in a school do you?

Sort of joking here- i think everybody should have to work 3 months in some sort of customer service role. 🤣

Mr Gr-Uncle did national service and is still alive, it did broaden his horizons but he did nearly die at one point.

Still the best tv on national service

There aren’t many people left alive who did compulsory National Service-they’d have to be over about 83!

It pisses me off when ranty people who weren’t forced to do it, decide that other people’s should have to because they are young!

YANBU. I think it’s beyond fucked up and would not be joining on principle.

If someone believes in a cause and actively goes out of their way to join, fab, crack on, we thank them for their service.

But someone being forced to join and represent something they don’t align with and didn’t choose? Hahahaha, no, absolutely fucking not.

Very conflicted about this idea as my town (reasonably affluent South Coast Uni town) is seeing an uptick in unruly teenage behaviour and large groups hanging around wearing dark trackies and face masks and being confrontational for no obvious reason.

I think part of the problem is the apparently well meaning attempts to give children autonomy and respect that has encouraged a bit of infantilisation of mid and older teens, and a feeling that consequences for anti-social behaviour are mild enough to run the risk. Or run ins with perceived “authority” are regarded as a badge of honour.

I think a lot of the problem is the reduction in youth supporting services by councils, so lack of youth clubs / community centres etc.

I think that any form of military based service would simply be unworkable, but perhaps organising outreach programmes to encourage things like participation in things like D of E etc might be a start particularly if it could be encouraged by kids from similar backgrounds who have done it and can point out the advantages in a language they all understand.

However, the teenage years are a time of experimenting, “finding oneself” etc and bucking against the established order, and the proliferation of online fodder for the disenfranchised is a big fly in the ointment as messages are confused and usually designed to make money out of kids and parents who don’t want their child to feel alienated or deprived.

It’s a pretty pickle in todays world and I don’t envy people with teenagers these days. My son is 29 and his teenage years were enough of a rollercoaster back then - hearing some of the issues that my friends are dealing with in regard to their confused and troubled teens makes me very sad.

You can’t shape a generation by one set of standards and suddenly expect them to snap into adult mode overnight. While every generation has been considered worse in terms of behaviour etc since time immemorial, previously we weren’t all plugged into rapidly evolving technology that can dictate a new zeitgeist on what seems to be a weekly basis.

I don’t know what the answer is, but National Service ain’t it.