Service in the United States | Citizenship | High school civics | Khan Academy

• [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?