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Comment by doctorstupid | Hacker News Reader

Sending affluent students to volunteer in poor neighbourhoods to get them into college is disgusting.

When I was in 12, I volunteered to help feed the poor at a soup kitchen. When I was in high school, there was a mandatory volunteer requirement of 40 hours just to graduate. Volunteering isn't disgusting, it's valuable experience. It's no different than putting volunteer experience on a resume to get a job. Volunteers are in short demand; it'd be much more disgusting to deny help just because their intents aren't purely altruistic. Heaven forbid you help someone and help yourself at the same time.

Uhh its not volunteering if its mandatory...

This.

Volunteer has to be free from pressure.

But we have a society that try to push "moral"values instead of freedom and pursuit of your OWN happiness (obeying laws).

The most salient lesson I got out of spending my high school summers doing volunteer construction is that I hate poor people.

I know the feeling. I wake up every morning hating myself for being poor.

Through four years and working for around thirty different families, I only met one that were just clearly in need of help. And they were a couple suffering from undiagnosed developmental disabilities. (The local social services took the opportunity of our construction project to gain access to the house and get them properly into the system.) Almost everyone else we worked for were just shiftless leechers prone to outbursts of violence.

It made me realize that most "humanitarian" outfits serving "the poor" are doing a great disservice to the elimination of human suffering. Subsidizing "the poor" just creates more poor people. If we really wanted to reduce human suffering, we would leave "the poor" to die off and subsidize the family formation and procreation of successful people.

Why?

It's quite patronising to be assisted by someone who doesn't really care for you, but is just using you to get into college, something that you might never experience.

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