Who says people would need to give up all those things?
Rishi said, when he said it would be one weekend a month. They aren’t Schrödinger's cat. They can’t be at their paid work and also in a different place working for free. Their employer can’t have them in shift doing the job they’ve employed them to do and the government have them litter picking 10 miles away at the same time.
Do you really think that is what happens in places where there is NS? Because it's not. Many of those things would continue much as they are.
No, because other NS schemes aren’t organised in the ridiculous way that this is proposed. They have a flexibility with age (x amount of time between the ages of y and z) rather than it has to be the second you start full time work or higher education in a different city, or in the middle of your FE course, and aren’t in pathetic little drips with 3 week gaps that don’t allow you to embrace it, learn from it, and develop actual competence and usefulness and actually make a contribution. They actually pay participants rather than expecting them to live on fresh air while they do it. They don’t just expect you get on with your life while chucking barriers at you at monthly intervals. I doubt they limit the volunteering to weekends either, eliminating huge swathes of the public sector and any evening activity and giving maximum interference with the jobs typically done by 18yos (and the hobbies of the especially entitled people) and making it an absolute administrative ballache for the public sector organisations having to place 700000 people into 4 sessions.
It's also temporary, and the reason it's usually proposed for younger people is because it dovetails in well to the end of their education years and can provide a good start into the adult working world
Being temporary doesn’t negate how disruptive it is. A year is a long time to have your income hobbled and to put off working life, travelling, university etc. It dovetails into nothing. Education and work may dovetail but this doesn’t. It blocks flexibility with paid employment, travel, existing volunteering on weekends, moving between towns, it makes a group of people just starting out in work spectacularly unattractive to employers. It will not teach a single skill that couldn’t have been learned in the previous 13 years of education and it will not “give anything back” - 25 days dragged over 12 months does not train people to do anything. Dovetailing would be something like the military training - robust, residential , paid, skilled, with a proper curriculum and consistency in supervision and could be treated like a y14 - but that’s limited and would fuck up anyone doing an actual y14 unless the FE funding model changed from 16-19 to 16-21. and it’s also complete nonsense that these military people are getting trained in 12 months for intelligence roles so I don’t think they should be pretending it is. It’s also a right kick in the face for regular recruits who will have to sign up for 4 years and not get a sniff of beginning to train for a cyber security until they have spent 18 months crawling through ditches and getting a bollocking that the mud has jammed their rifle AND they will have to do a degree.
Your whole post, that it's crazy that anyone should expect to give up anything like even a weekend hobby, for a short time, to serve the wider community, reeks of entitlement
My actual whole post was mostly about paid employment but, no. YOU are entitled that you think your plans for another adults weekend are better than the ones they have made for themselves. It shouldn’t matter what the plans are but you are self righteousness demanding that they give up:
Hobbies (why the actual fuck shouldn’t 18 yo be allowed weekend hobbies? Why? A 17yo can and a 19yo so why not at 18? Why is it ok at 8 and 12 and 33 and 68 but not at 18?)
Sports (It shouldn’t matter if it’s Emma Raducanu, or someone who is always last. If that’s when that completion or match or class or training session is, why should people miss it? How entitled are you, demanding people let their team down, don’t go to training, don’t turn up on the start line.)
Paid work (in the real world people need this money to live on. They are not being “entitled” to need to earn money. In the real world interviewers score on flexibility - needing every 4th weekend off will down score you so you are less likely to get a job at all. )
Volunteering (they need to give up the volunteering they do to do different volunteering - they are being “entitled” to want to spend their time volunteering and must stop)
Studying - lots of 18yos continue in education. It’s not being “entitled” to want to do this.
Relaxing - summon a policeman - an adult is having a rest after working a 7 day stretch in a prison/mine/psych ward/kitchen/care home. - you do know most of these “entitled” people work full time, don’t you? With the exception of students who often only work weekends and now won’t be able to.
Why are you so entitled to that you expect this one specific group to, not only “serve the wider community”, compelled by law, in a way that you don’t, but to not even allow them to do it in their time off? They HAVE to do it when they should be at work or when they have other plans? Why? It’s spectacularly arse about face. The entitlement that you can’t even allow people to continue serving the wider community in the volunteering they already do, or indeed the paid work that contributes to society, but leave that and have to do different volunteering reeks so much it’s starting to smell like spite.