Read this essay on social service in school

Social service means service to society with no personal gain. It is the crying need of India. The spirit of social service must be fostered among the boys and girls at school. It must be a part and parcel of their daily education.

I am a student of the B. K. Higher Secondary School, Amritsar. We are daily given lessons and training in social service. We look after the sanitation of the school ourselves. We keep the rooms, the compounds, the grounds and the premises of the school neat and clean. Boys are taught in a loving manner not to throw bits of paper, orange peels and banana skins anywhere except in receptacles placed ail over the school premises. We are taught to help the poor boys with money, clothes and books.

During the earthquake in Gujarat we collected money, clothes, books and radios. In fact boys vied with one another to give more and more out of their pocket money. Our scouts and N.C.C. Cadets render quite useful service on the occasion of festivals, fairs, famines and floods. Scouting, N.C.C., A.C.C., Red Cross and School Welfare Societies are very useful movements in our school. They make us social and helpful to society.

During the vacation, batches of students under the guidance of teachers and senior students go to villages and teach the villagers clean habits of living and small courtesies and decencies of life. We spread literacy among the villagers. We enlighten them on the new methods of agriculture. We lend them a helping hand in building roads, houses and wells.

We tell them how to use banks and how to invest in the saving schemes. We sometime feed the hungry, give clothes to the naked and help old men and women in several ways. We enlighten the villagers on the need for vaccination against small-pox and against tuberculosis, which kill thousands of people every year in India.

We also enlighten them on the need of family planning. The population of India is rising by leaps and bounds and it is very necessary for villagers, too, to realize the need of curbing the birth rate.

On Sundays and other holidays, we sometime go to the slum areas of our own city. We teach the slum dwellers to keep their surroundings and houses neat and clean. We specially attend to delinquent and vagrant children. We persuade them not to steal and gamble.

In short, no pains are spared to inculcate in the students of our school a genuine spirit of social service. We are made to feel every day that India cannot rise and take her proud place in the comity of nations until and unless we start a nation-wide campaign of social service to supplement governmental efforts under the Five-Year-Plans in improving the conditions of life in villages.

There is a social atmosphere in the school. We are trained to act together like disciplined soldiers for the sake of others. We are taught to render social service without noise. It is impressed upon us time and again that it is best performed when the left hand does not know what the right is doing.