Research on the Normalization of College Students' Voluntary Service

Abstract

College students' voluntary service has been continuously developing in recent years in our country, but there is still a certain gap between the college students' voluntary service in China and those in the United States and countries in West Europe. The major research orientation for institutions of higher learning is to normalize college students' voluntary service and how to overcome the obstacles in the development of voluntary service in our country. This paper aims at existing problems in college students' voluntary service in our country to propose several suggestions on the normalization of voluntary service in terms of legal safeguard, organization and management and college students' initiative in order to enhance college students' social responsibility and construct harmonious and friendly social environment. Keywords—college students, voluntary service, normalization In recent years, with institutions of higher learning attaching great importance to the participation of college students in voluntary service, voluntary service has become an important channel for college students to enrich their college lives, obtain social experience and build social responsibility. The voluntary service has been expanding from traditional poverty relief, environmental protection and community service to large-scale national activities in which college students are the main force in recent years. Based on serving and contributing to society, college students' voluntary service has an increasing influence on society and has played a positive role in building harmonious society. At present, although substantial progress has been made in voluntary service in institutions of higher learning, compared with those in countries like the Unites States, there still exists some problems, for example, college students are not so active to participate in these voluntary services and the voluntary service lacks sustainable development. Therefore, this paper discusses the pattern of transformation from phased development to permanent development through analyzing current problems and shortcoming in college students' voluntary service. I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NORMALIZATION FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS' VOLUNTARY SERVICE A. It is helpful to train and improve college students' ability to normalize voluntary service. The knowledge and environment that college students are exposed to on campus is quite different from that of voluntary activities. On campus, college students treat themselves as students who need to study hard, respect teachers, unite other students and perform their own duty. While in voluntary service activities, higher requirements are imposed on them than that on campus. Through voluntary service, college students learn to take their own responsibility for the society and other people, which requires them to master knowledge that cannot be learned on campus, for example, when they help primary school students study in villages, they need to transfer their own knowledge into the ability to impart knowledge to other people. They need to communicate with different kinds of people in different voluntary activities, which can improve their abilities in expression, communication, accommodation, comprehension and problem-solving. B. It is helpful to strengthen college students' social responsibility to normalize voluntary service. College students are the future pillars of the society and they need to shoulder the future of the country and nation. Therefore, their attitude toward the society and other people decide the social atmosphere and cultural environment of a country in the future. Institutions of higher learning, as the main institutions for college students' ideological work, have the responsibility to guide them to clearly understand what kind of sense of social responsibility they should have, their social position and the responsibilities they should shoulder. Since college student have not officially entered into the society, they can make full preparation before graduation from colleges through participation in voluntary service. By taking part in public welfare and poverty relief at grass-root level, they can be aware that there are lots of vulnerable groups and marginal groups in society and have their own experience and understanding on the development of our country and the environment in which people live, thus stimulating their sympathy and sense of responsibility and triggering them to think actively. Moreover, they can devote themselves to the society and ask for nothing in return, enhancing their sense of responsibility and mission to contribute to the development of the country and the nation [1]. C. It is helpful for college students to make a bigger contribution to the society to normalize voluntary service. By the end of 2017, there are more than 6.72 million real name registered volunteers in our country. National young volunteers network has basically formed, which is composed of Chinese Young Volunteers Association, 35 associations at provincial level, over 5,000 associations at municipal and 3rd International Seminar on Education Innovation and Economic Management (SEIEM 2018) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 286