The most worrisome of Barack Obama’s proposals is his goal of bringing most charities under the federal umbrella in part by inducing all middle and high school children to do 50 hours of community service every year.
The details are on his campaign website and in his speeches calling Americans to service.
By requiring almost all public middle schoolers, starting at the age of 10 or 11, to join his new cadres of community service workers and become part of his “civilian national security force,” Barack Obama shows himself to be out of touch with American traditions of individual volunteerism.
There is nothing wrong with a family allowing a child to volunteer at a young age: in the summer when I was 11, I spent several nights a week working for free at a concession stand in a little league baseball park. My parents were comfortable with this community service because at all times I was under the supervision of my mother’s best friend. Parents then and parents today would like to choose whether their 11-year old child takes on even a part time job, and they would like to choose the job and judge for themselves whether the working conditions are suitable.
With his myriad proposals for new "Corps" and his proposal for universal service for all school children, Obama is trying to bring the charitable activities of 50 to 100 million people –- about half of them children –- under state control. That our government is even capable of running a service program on a scale never before attempted is a matter of faith, not evidence.
Steven Malanga of City Journal has an article that deals more with Barack Obama’s past than his proposals for the future.
Community organizing’s roots stretch back to the 1930s and Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of Rules for Radicals. But it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious plan to end poverty through massive federal spending that the Alinsky model—grassroots organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood—really took off. Starting in the mid-1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to neighborhood groups, convinced that they knew better than Washington what their communities needed. The federal funds, eventually supplemented by state and local tax dollars, helped create a universe of government-funded community groups running everything from job-training programs to voter-registration drives—far beyond anything Alinsky could have imagined. Some 3,000 local social-services groups were soon receiving government funding in New York City alone. Many were new, but the money also helped turn traditional charities that had operated on private donations into government contractors.
Those who led these social-services groups became advocates, unsurprisingly, for government-funded solutions to social problems. To defend and expand their turf, organizers began heading into the political arena, wielding the power they had accumulated in neighborhoods to build a base of supporters. In New York, operators of huge social-services groups like Pedro Espada in the Bronx and Albert Vann in Brooklyn won election to state and federal posts after heading up large, powerful nonprofits. By the late 1980s, nearly 20 percent of New York City Council members were products of the government-funded nonprofit sector, and they were among the most strident advocates for higher taxes and more government spending. In other cities, too, from Chicago to Cleveland to Los Angeles, the road to electoral success increasingly ran through the government-funded social-services sector. Spending directed to these groups boomed through both Republican and Democratic administrations. “The non-profit service sector has never been richer, more powerful,”former welfare recipient Theresa Funiciello wrote in her 1993 book Tyranny of Kindness. “Except to the poor, poverty is a mega-business.”
Obama began his organizing life in the mid-1980s in a community group whose progress mirrored that of the rest of the industry: the Developing Communities Project, formed on Chicago’s South Side as a “faith-based grassroots organization organizing and advocating for social change.” Though founded with resources from a coalition of churches, over time the DCP evolved, like many left-leaning religious organizations, into a government contractor essentially subsisting on tax money—with nearly 80 percent of its revenues deriving from public contracts and grants.
As a young college graduate immersed in the world of tax-bankrolled activism, Obama adopted the big-government ethos that prevailed among neighborhood organizers who viewed attempts to reform poverty programs as attacks on the poor. Speaking to an alternative weekly on the eve of his 1995 run for state senate, Obama said . . . that “these are mean, cruel times . . . .” He derided the “old individualistic bootstrap myth” of American achievement that conservatives were touting. Self-help strategies “have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda,” he wrote in a chapter that he contributed to a 1990 book, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. (He also depicted leftist community organizing as a harder task than similar efforts by the Christian Right, telling a reporter in 1995 that “it’s always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness and false nostalgia.”)
Related Posts (on one page):
- Obama's New "Corps" And Other Service Programs.
- Obama’s College Service Programs.
- Involuntary Associations and National Service.--
- Community Service for all Middle and High School Children.--
Also, it is unclear yet how much better John McCain is on service; he will be speaking at Service Nation in a couple weeks. I expect his position to be clearer then. He certainly has a strong statist streak as well, though I doubt that he will propose anything quite as sweeping as Obama's plan.
This is not a fair representation of the proposal, and I'd imagine you know that.
I'm interested to know if you are opposed to service learning in general, and whether you dispute the studies which have shown that students who participate in such programs are more likely to graduate, earn better grades, and engage in community service after graduation?
The last time this issue was discussed on this site, some of the comments revealed concern that service learning is just a mask for ideologically driven forced labor. What's the evidence for this? I've never found anything like that to be true.
It would be a wonderful thing for the country if we could do a better job of employing the talents of people who want to give back and aren't sure where to begin. It would also be a wonderful thing if more students learned the value of community service and made it a habit. Where is the downside?
2. The author of this essay is out of touch with the reality of the state of the nation if he believes that young parents today are at all concerned with teaching their children about the value of volunteering.
3. There are plenty of countries that require this type of service and they still enjoy civil liberties.
Please don't make the mistake of discounting the enormous lack of patriotism and civil engagement among young people today. A program that requires positive action is no different from one that requires school attendance. Activism for young people is just another form of education!
Kids are remarkably good at detecting hypocrisy and nonsense. They will understand that the adults around them are not leading by example (certainly, no one is yet proposing that all adults be subject to such a requirement), but, in their own accounting, credit the labour of others to themselves. It will breed a generation of individuals with deep contempt for those who can wield power over others.
It will also breed a generation of individuals who do not know the joy of doing something for its own sake, for its own good. Even if students would have worked at the local library, spent time with senior citizens, or built houses for Habitat for Humanity, they will miss the joy of doing something because it advances one's most fundamental morals.
The only good thing that could come out of this is that children would understand how precious freedom is, because they will see what they cannot have under such a regime.
First, the conly constitutional authority the President has to do something like that is the power to call up militia. However, to call up persons of age 10 we would need to adopt a new Militia Act, amending 10 USC 311 to reduce the minumum age of the mandatory militia, subject to call up, down from 17 to 10.
Second, the only constitutional purposes for which militia can be called up are "to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions", which doesn't include "community service" of the kind Mr. Obama seems to have in mind. However, it would be entirely appropriate to require the kids to be organized and trained in militia skills, especially the responsible and effective use of firearms, criminal investigation and arrest, and crowd control. Although disaster response is not a federal militia purpose, it could include such skills as long as a nexus is maintained to the other federal militia purposes.
Actually, most skills which public skills try to teach can be reasonably regarded to have a nexus to militia. Militiamen need to be able to read, write, do math, and have a knowleddge of government, law, and science. The beauty of making these things part of their militia training is that as militia they will be subject to military discipline. They may become more motivated to learn if the alternative is "gimme ten", KP or latrine duty, or being locked up in the stockade. Skipping school would be "missing a formation" or "desertion", and if we are in a state of war, the kid could be shot. Nothing like an Article 15 or court martial to focus the mind.
Let's all tell Mr. Obama we're behind him on this, if understood as outlined above.
"most skills which public schools ..."
Please tell me how this is not a fair presentation of the Obama proposal.
Mr. Obama describes his Plan as a national service program that is both “universal” and “voluntary.” Yet in a free society a national service program can't be both universal and truly voluntary.
One hurdle that Mr. Obama’s plan must vault is the U.S. Constitution, which limits the federal government to enumerated powers. Lacking the power to mandate universal community service directly, Mr. Obama candidly discloses his strategy: making federal funds contingent on schools having service programs that meet federal standards.
Because Mr. Obama calls his plan voluntary, it’s important to understand exactly what he says and doesn’t say. In both of his main speeches on national service – on July 2, 2008 and on December 5, 2007 – Barack Obama set his goal of 50 hours of service a year, promised that “We'll reach this goal,” and explained how he would do so for middle and high school children:
If Obama hadn’t promised that “We’ll reach this goal” of 50 hours a year of service for all students, one might read his proposal as indicating that he would require schools to have service programs, but that these programs might not require 50 hours of service. Yet the only way that almost every 11-year old public school student in the country would serve 50 hours a year – i.e., the only way that Mr. Obama could reach his goal – is by doing what he seems to indicate he’s going to do: setting a federal goal of 50 hours a year for each middle school student and reaching that goal by making federal funds contingent on middle schools requiring their students to serve those 50 hours.
Thus, it would be the public schools that would impose federal standards of coerced service on each child as part of their requirements for graduation. For students, service would be involuntary. Even for the public schools, their participation would be only nominally voluntary – for how many public schools can survive without federal assistance?
Lest there be any remaining doubt that Barack Obama’s “voluntary” universal service plan contemplates mandatory service for children, his Service Plan praises mandatory service in the sentence that immediately precedes his call for 50 hours of service: “Schools that require service as part of the educational experience create improved learning environments and serve as resources for their communities.” Moreover, in his Plan, he promises to “develop national guidelines for service-learning and community service programs,” thus not leaving the content of service programs to the states.
I suspect that Mr. Obama describes his mandatory plan as voluntary for good reasons: part of his plan – i.e., participating in his many new “Corps” – is indeed voluntary, and people bristle at the word “mandatory.”
The other issue is whether it will apply to private schools; he is unclear on this point, but if they get public funding, then I think the answer is YES.
As for setting government standards, he is clear the the govt will set standards for community service charities. And his SERVE-STUDY program for college students explicitly rejects working in college libraries as not the sort of charitable work that will count as community service.
Obama also has otherr sweeping plans to help bring much of private charity under the government umbrella:
We also fail to see those programs churning out students with a deep mistrust of those who wield power. If being required to perform some activity in school really has that effect, what we are to make of mandatory P.E. and music? What about anything students are demanded to do at school that they might not choose on their own? (History? Trigonometry? Duck-duck-goose?)
The faulty assumption seems to be that community service is merely "volunteering" that has nothing to do with learning, and therefore should remain purely "voluntary" as opposed to all the other forced activites that qualify as learning experiences.
FWIW, my wife teaches at a private school that does have a community-service requirement, but it's only for the high-school kids, and it's only 15 hours a year, and at least half of that can be fulfilled through some school-wide organized events.
In college, it jumps to 100 hours a year, but that is voluntary (though whether the proposed college pay of $40 an hour makes sense is another matter).
On the surface there is nothing wrong with the proposal. Voluntary community service can be an enriching experience both for the child and the community. The trouble starts when the government steps in. The inevitable effect is the substitution of individual volunteerism by a huge bureaucratic machine that subsists on tax money. Like many bad proposals, the detrimental effects show up slowly, but when they do, they are hard to remove.
To those who think this is good idea, the trouble is that these kind of proposals convert non-governmental organizations that flourish on private philanthropy into inefficient arms of the government. Also, as the linked article points out, those who lead these social-services groups become advocates for government-funded solutions to social problems. The result is more social problems, not less.
Volunteerism is a wonderful thing but to be truly voluntary and useful, it needs to be more than an arms length away from government control.
Now, it is possible that the government can still have some role in such programs and have a positive effect -- if it is done the right way. However I fear that will not be the case.
First, middle schoolers in my area are 12-13. So by specifying that it would begin with 5th graders (10-11), you're making an unfair choice about how to represent this proposal.
You then suggest that these 5th graders would be "cadres" of a "national security force"--rhetoric that suggests a rather misleading image of what the service learning or commuunity service would entail. So yes, that's unfair.
Your real dispute is with the word "required", because like I said before, you apparently do not believe that service learning is really "learning" rather than simply volunteering, something that as the name implies should be a purely personal choice of how to spend time. I assume you have no problem with requiring public school students to perform other activities that are deemed useful for learning. Community service can provide valuable practical service that makes lessons more meaningful and memorable to students. Those who participate in these programs are more successful as students in a number of ways, according to empirical research on the subject.
As an example, the local school here has students go on field trips to a bread factory and a dairy, among other places. I suppose they can opt out, but it's "required" for practical purposes. Presumably they do this not simply to break up the monotony of the day, but because something valuable might be gained from seeing how such places operate. It's not so different with service learning.
Should the govt. withhold funding unless schools institute a minumum amt of service? No, I'd agree with you there. The approach sounds too heavy handed. But with a few changes it could be a terrific initiative for our young people and this country.
Exactly.
Mandatory community service sucks in much that is private and diverse and spits out an excessively homogenized version of the good, a version that would come with a government seal of approval.
It’s probably not an accident that many American groups who tend to favor greater government largesse are relatively stingy in their own donations to charity.
Nor do I think it an accident that Americans are the most generous people in the world, while the few European countries that have universal military or community service have populations that fall far short of America’s in donating their time and money to the less fortunate.
For charity work to be truly transformative in a positive way, perhaps it must be truly voluntary.
If you proposed, "Okay, let's take six days from the school year, and have no class; just send the classes out to do community service instead"... you'd get laughed out of the room. Even the people in favor of volunteer service aren't going to tell you that it's more important than classroom instruction.
So instead, we should have kids take six days of their own time, to go to state-sponsored events, with state-paid supervisors (because of course it has to be supervised!), to perform the same tasks. Er... or we could just pay teachers a bit more and hold six more days of class, I guess. Which would benefit children more?
You can turn that argument around too, of course. If we think students should spend six more days a year in school, why aren't they now? Haven't we already made a determination of how many days a student should be in school and should not be in school? If they've actually got this extra free time, shouldn't we extend the days they're in school? If we're not extending those days, maybe it's because we've already determined they don't have this extra time?
Keep in mind that children, unlike their parents, are routinely expected to perform mandatory tasks outside of the dedicated hours of employment; you may get to work 9-5 and go home, but Junior has to take an hour or two (or three, or four - teachers are not good about coordinating) of work home with him. In that sense, it's asinine to require children to perform additional unpaid labor.
I think this relates to a particular mindset -- one that dismisses private endeavours (and whose advocates are often personally stingy) but expects the government to solve all the problems of the country (apparently with money that would drop from the sky).
Two actual projects from my local elementary: Students learned about plant biology as they designed, planted, and maintained gardens around the school and on public spaces in the neighborhood. Students learning about computers helped to design some web pages with student resources, and for PTA events. I know that some of these events took place during the regular school day, while others may have taken place after school, but it's "service" that obviously involves practical application of the things being taught in the classroom. Not exactly what I think of as the work of "cadres" of a "civilian national security force", but this is service learning and it's effective both for academic teaching and as a way to get students invested in what they are doing in school and in what happens in their communities.
An actual project from a university here: Students serve as translators for patients at a local clinic. Some of the students come from language classes and get an opportunity to hone their skills with real native speakers, and others are pursuing careers in health care and will obtain valuable practical experience this way. Where is the downside to "forcing" this, any worse than the downside of "forcing" students to take pop quizzes? A lot of students learn effectively by doing, and it doesn't hurt that they have more pride in and commitment to their work when it involves this kind of service.
RESPONSE:
Thanks for responding.
1. A month ago, I actually researched the literature on middle schools and what grades they start. I believe that over 90% have moved to 6th grade (some are even younger, starting in 5th grade). The ones that start in 7th grade are uncommon and anyways are traditionally called Jr. High Schools, not middle schools, which is what Obama was referring to. Last, he sends his own kids go to a school that starts middle school at 6th grade, so that's an additional reason to think he meant exactly what I took him to mean. As for the age entering middle school, in most of the few states I looked at, most children would be 11 when they entered but the younger ones would be 10.
2. The language about a "civilian national security force" comes from the July 2 speech, though it was not in the pre-released text. He said:
It's clear from the speech that Obama is referring to his many new and expanded "corps" and the programs for student community service. With all the "corps" and Obama calling them a "civilian national security force," I think my use of the word "cadre" is both fair and less extreme than the language he used himself.
There are a lot of things that would be absolutely delightful to teach small children. That does not mean that every proposed method of teaching those thing is appropriate, effective, and wise.
Furthermore, the government simply does not have business teaching morals to children. Liberals, for some reason, fail to see their own viewpoints as a version of morality, but morals it is, nonetheless, and morals it is that the government is attempting to shove down the throats of students, as if one can equate the exercise of one's freedom, morality, and talent with trigonometry.
There are good reasons for the government to not get into the business of teaching morality. One would think that we would have learned such, back when the government's version of morality included everything from Prohibition to denying basic civil liberties to people under the theory that it was best for society.
Let public schools stick to reading and math - that which they are barely able to do anyway.
When the Red Cross comes to campus, students will wait in line for two hours to give blood. There is a severe shortage of blood in the summer time, and, in general. What is wrong with "forcing" healthy students to donate? I mean, they are going to do it anyway, and they get the satisfaction of knowing that they saved people's lives - which is a heck of a lot more satisfying than planting a few flowers.
Given the benefits of breast feeding and having a stay-at-home parent, what is wrong with "forcing" new moms to do both?
Sure it can. It can be universal in the sense of being universally available. It can also mean that he's setting an (enthusiastically high) goal of high participation achieved through sheer voluntary popularity.
When a business states that it has a goal of growing its market share by 10% next quarter, does that mean it's going to go out and force 10% more people to use its products? No, it means that it will use techniques in its power, such as making its products available in more stores or increasing their appeal through redesign or marketing. The 10% goal means that the business will measure the degree to which it has succeeded by looking for that rise in market share. Setting a goal for a program's popularity does not mean that the program must be applied by force.
I don't believe in "service learning" because it amounts to unfair competition. If towns and states want to hire teenagers to do various jobs, they can either pay the current minimum wage or pass a law reducing that wage. But the attitude expressed above is tawdry paranoia and fearmongering.
And if that doesn't work, we always have a massive welfare state enforced by a militarized police force to expand and fall back on.
I hate to be really obnoxious, so I won't list all the words which fit people who think the joys of volunteering for worthy causes can be learned when it's forced. Of course, they don't think so. They just like seeing others forced.
This is terrible.
Exactly right.
That Mr. Obama’s view of service is narrower than mine is suggested by his proposal to move from college work-study to college “Serve-Study.” He plans to mandate that 25% of college work-study jobs be directed away from working on campus, “such as in libraries and dining halls,” to working in the community, eventually hoping to raise that to proportion to 50% of work-study hours.
Thus, Obama wouldn’t count as “service” my wife’s college work-study job as a weekend librarian in the University of Chicago’s School of Social Work (one of the country’s best), but if my wife had done one of Barack Obama’s preferred tasks, picking up trash in the slum behind the School, Obama would count that as service.
Reasonable people may differ on whether aiding in the education of social work students is more valuable than picking up trash.
Yet in my wife’s student days, picking up trash would probably have done little good in the long run because (as the Boston Globe revealed) the government-supported housing projects developed or managed by Obama’s friends, clients, and biggest contributors within 500 yards of the back of Chicago’s School of Social Work were allowed to deteriorate by his political donors, pretty much destroying most of the temporary improvements made in that neighborhood.
For my wife, a future academic who grew up in a poor, racially diverse neighborhood, with parents who worked on assembly lines in small factories and had no college education (one had no high school education), she probably benefited more from her intern-like paid job in a library than she would have from picking up trash.
Hmmmm...
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
"The [Obamessiah] Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The [Democratic Party] and the [Republican Party] came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
Collective "voluntarism" is not voluntary, it's collectivism and a type of nascent or formative statism, it also erodes individuation and individually assigned and chosen ethical accomplishments. Genuine community proceeds out of the latter, not the former.
To be sure, I would prefer to leave this to be decided at the local level, rather than federal. But we're moving toward federal control of scools anyway
Rosenburg attempted to get someone from Obama's campaign to come on the show to counter Kurtz prior to the show. The spokeman demanded the name of the station manager and then hung up on Rosenberg's staffer. Obama's national headquarters is down the street from WGN's studios. Many of the pro-Obama callers cited the talking points reported above. I don't wnat to hi-jack this thread but I thought that for anyone interested in Kurtz' research and the implications that it has on Obama's relationship with Ayers, etc. this would be importatnt information.
Can you say "Obama Youth"?
If this happens I'll start a nonprofit that specializes in activities that result in libertarian and conservative oriented learning by the students. Free labor!
And young minds all reading Anthem and watching The Fountainhead!
The difference is that math and phys ed are important education, but mandatory community service teaches them the pernicious notion that the state is the boss whereas they should learn the opposite, that the individual, the people are sovereign.
. I suppose they could be the Young Obama Komsomol...
If we want to teach the kids something useful, require them to get a job.
Abe summarizes it best
like homework?
"The first black man with a good chance to become president, and he wants to bring back slavery. Fantastic."
wow.
Education policy seems to be written by rich whites who attended schools with all smart people who wanted to learn, where no one worked a job, and where they plenty of free time for resume building.
After watching the HBO series about the pathetic Baltimore City High Schools, does anyone believe that a shcool district where most high schoolers read at the 4th grade level is going to be able to document a community service requirement.
As with most educational reforms, the poor schools will ignore them, the middle class schools with cut other programs to fund them, and the rich kid schools are already doing them.
If you can ask that question with a straight face, you will not be able to comprehend any answer anyone might give.
I'm not positive, but I believe you are mischaracterizing (or at least failing to mention) several aspects of the policy.
First, I believe the Obama plan (based solely on the links you provided above) would be implemented through the imposition of conditions on the receipt of federal funds for public education. Similar conditions have repeatedly been upheld (e.g., the drinking age), and I'm not sure on what grounds you think they would be struck down in this case. Perhaps you could clarify?
Second, and relatedly, I believe Obama intends to implement the plan only in public schools. "Universal" strikes me as rhetorical, although it certainly is used confusingly by the campaign. But I believe the intended meaning is "essentially universal among public school students because most public school districts would be crazy to turn down federal funds."
I'm pretty sure the suggestion that healthy students be forced to give blood was reductio ad absurdum of the argument that compulsory performance of a service that does good is okay, because the result is a perceived net benefit. To wit, the end justifies the means.
I personally average 200-300 hours of community server per year. I believe that charity begins at home, community service makes me a better person and makes my community a better place to live.
I was an Eagle Scout and had to participate with and organize community service projects to obtain this award. My Eagle project was to organize, fund, and complete the restoration of the doorway of the a local historical site. I was 13 years old. There was over 1000 man-hours of labor in that project. 30 years later, I still have a sense of accomplishment when I see those doors.
However, I do this willingly. If I was forced to do it, I wouldn't do it with the same willing heart and I wouldn't gain from it.
This is my basic problem with liberal solutions. These are people with a good heart. They want to help people. They see the answers, but can't get anyone else to do what they want, so they turn to Government to force people into their mold of morality. People aren't charitable enough, fine, we'll have the Government pay for the Charity and extract the money by force in the form of taxes. People aren't doing enough community service, fine, we'll force criminals to do it as part of their sentencing. Still not enough people doing community service, fine, now we will force school children to do service work to be able to graduate.
Taxes do not equal Charity and Forced Service is not the same as willing service. Society won't change because you force them to act the way you want them to.
A willing heart and willing hands are what we want to encourage. Train non-profit organizations on how to maximize the efforts of occasional volunteers. Help them advertise their needs to their community. Teach people that service is fun. Train Schools and Churches how to organize service projects. Publicly recognize the outstanding accomplishments of volunteers in your community.
But don't ever think that forced service will change someone's heart. Tying things like graduation requirements into Service is wrong. It sends the wrong message.
That said: Everybody. Stop. Using. The. Public. Schools. As. An. Intervention. Point. For. Public. Policy.
On anything.
Last time I think it was the HPV vaccine we were discussing. I have no problem with the vaccine as such. I just think it's outrageous to use public school attendance as a way to make the vaccine mandatory. Same with community service.
If the Boy Scouts, a private university, or a church chooses to make community service a requirement for membership, that's fine with me. But leave the public schools out of it. Most families have no choice but to use them, so you've basically got a captive population for social engineering. That's what makes this proposal a problem. Of course, the proponents will say that's what makes this proposal attractive. Nobody is going to get me to agree with that worldview.
Now, if it were a matter of merely providing the opportunity for kids to get something, whether a vaccine or a chance to volunteer, then I have no problem with using the school property as a place to coordinate. A school is a big building that isn't in use all day. My only problem is with imposing non-educational requirements as terms of attendance. And I don't buy the arguments presented above that service is automatically educational. It may be, but that proposition has to be defended on a case-by-case basis.
Maybe kids could keep their classrooms neat and clean by volunteering to sweep, mop, vacuum and clean the windows.
No possibility, or desirability, that we push back? Just go with the flow?
runape,That's an enormous bug, not a feature.
Advocates of "mandatory volunteering" have yet to explain what someone gets out of doing "meals on wheels" that they don't get from delivering for Dominos. Is not getting paid a benefit?
If they're going to be forced to clean up parks, how about forcing them to do front yard work for private property as well?
Good point. Some information about that is here:
McCain is obviously a Marxist.
Because they are smaller than us. Duh!
Why is it not obvious that Obama lusts for the power to, among many other things, control how I raise my child? Why is it not obvious that service to the state (at age 10 or 11!) is the ideology of totalitarianism? Do people need to see "brownshirts" marching in the streets before they will grasp the implications of an Obama child corps?
I'm glad vassil petrov mentioned Hitler, because everyone knows it's a short, slippery slope from enforcing civic duty to invading countries and targeting sending people to concentration camps.
It may not be short, but it is a slippery slope. It erodes values of freedom of association. And of the meaning of words. "Enforcing civic duty" is nothing but doublespeak.
Two of the four were in a HS which required community service (working on campus in media library counted). The 4th was in NHS which required 10 hours a year (x 2 years). Community library work counted. Problem with #4 was it was hard to find local community service 'work.' The hospital wasn't taking any more volunteer kids. She ended up at a food bank which meant she (or we) drove 10 or 15 miles each way. Nice.
Three of the kids did summer mission work for anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks, here and/or abroad. Does that count?
Who is going to provide the jobs, create the jobs, supervise the jobs and get the kids to the jobs?? Obama's people? Or some poor teacher who just wants to *teach*? Or another federal employee who can never be fired?
Why does everything the groupie-think-people want to do involve more and more positions and more and more paper work? (Mandatory vounteering equals thousands and thousands of dead trees for absolutely no reason but to make do gooders feel gooder. Do us all a favor -- Save the trees.)
Forget the schools. You guys who are so flip about the kids doing it at school have no idea what it's like. REAL educational things are getting shunted aside because of heavy layers of state (tied to federal) requirements.
My last kid did honors and AP classes, NHS, 4-H, Pony Club, cello and worked part time. Worked in the church nursery regularly. Oh yea, and her NHS volunteer work. And a mission trip.... Sometimes she slept.
So who is going to do the paper work to satisfy the apparatchiks that her nursery duty was worthy of credit for "volunteer" community servce? It is none of their *&^% business.
She was just a high school kid, and she only got to do this once. She did not need to be told she had to do one more thing (except do the dishes ;-) ). I am sure she will be a productive member of society. MAKING people do things for the good of the state (who defines that?) is very very intrusive.
She doesn't belong to the State and neither do we. The State belongs to We, the people.
Barak Obama apparently didn't learn that growing up, or from Saul Alinksy or Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright or Father Pflegler.
Does it help people to volunteer (the volunteers as well as the project)? Of course. But instead of extorting it, how about exhorting a culture of volunteerism ... oops! Wait ... think post hurricane relief work ... think tsunami relief donations ... think ... fill in the blanks, folks ....
Mandatory volunteerism, or even mandatory community service is not what we want, need or desire. More people need to realize what this guy has in mind to "organize" us.
Its beyond me how so many cannot see the distinction.
Also, a mass of volunteers will overwhelm the system, and what we will see is a lot of young people's time wasted doing meaningless things just to 'fill the required time'.
So the Hitler-Jugend would have been OK if it just hadn't led to "invading countries and targeting sending people to concentration camps"?
Don Miller- I think its wonderful you devote so much time to charity. Perhaps you were introduced to it at home, and discovered its rewards. Myself, I was introduced to it while in high school, which did have required community service. It was probably one of the most important educational experience of my life, one I might never have learned had it not been for high school. The program doesn't force adults to do community service, it forces children. We force children to do alot of things, so that they are equipped to make the best choices for themselves when they're adults. I don't see how this is any different from forcing kids to learn history, or science, or gym, or one of the million other skills learned in school that may be useless, but also may help the child make the best choices for himself when he is an adult.
Just my thoughts....
Point taken, but it's my sneaking suspicion that most old-people can be readily manhandled, or successfully threatened, into doing "community service" work.
Two words, just two words: withhold meds.
At the time Guyana had a population of barely 650,000 people and yet had the following military and para-military groups; Guyana Defense Force, Guyana Police, the People's Militia, and National Service (actually a paramilitary force). One can well imagine how much of a drain these groups were on national resources.
Add to that the requirement for all school children to spend countless hours in the hot tropical sun practicing for "Mass Games" to be staged for the country's independence celebrations (based on the North Korean practice. The then president of Guyana visited North Korea and fell in love with their "mass games").
This national service proposal is simply East African socialism in disguise (read Kenyatta, Nyrere, Nkrumah and others); just as Obama's relatives are practicing it in Kenya and as it was attempted in the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.
The upshot of "national service" in Guyana was that the country slipped from its status as the "bread basket of the Caribbean" under British rule to one rivaling Haiti as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
The final straw was when the government mandated that all "civil servants" must volunteer to cut sugar cane as part of their national service. My mother decided that we'd be better off migrating to the U.S.
I can't help but think that this is part of Bill Ayers' philosophy adopted by Obama since Ayers made similar proposals under the guise of transforming education in Venezuela.
FWIW, I'm a black man but I wasn't thinking of voting for Obama - there are lots of blacks who think like me - and this proposal certainly gives me further pause.
While this article focuses on Obama's proposal, McCain also has his own mandatory national service scheme. So I don't see much difference between the candidates on this issue. Neither one stands up for the right of the individual to his own life.
Government should intrude in the life of its people as little as possible. Protecting children from cigarettes when they are not really capable of making informed choices about their health is quite a different thing from forcing them to 'work' one or two hours a week 'for their own good'.
Also, requiring them to learn reading, math and science - knowledge which is necessary to get along in life on a basic level - is quite different from "you should volunteer because it will make you a finer person".
And there is a lot of nonsense being 'taught' in schools today. I would support streamlining the schools' curriculum. Afterall, American's average public school kids are not exactlying excelling in the basics, are they? Its is far more important that the kids read, write and calculate well than is it that they volunteer at this stage. Leave the character development to the parents.
One could also look at the GI bill and our (truly) volunteer military as a better example of a way to have government encourage participation. In this event, colleges themselves are not forced to send students to boot camp, but those who choose boot camp are provided *additional* benefits in the form of college tuition. This sweetens the pot a bit without taking away something that citizens already have.
The proposal by Obama is, like most of his suggestions, a well-intentioned disaster. My kids participate in charity through their church. I refuse to have to fill out a fricking federal form to explain it to avoid some other penalty.
Obama is bad, bad, bad news for America.
Adam,
You make a good point about forcing children to do things because it is good for them, but you miss the big picture.
The role of schools is to teach children how to read and write.
I support schools providing volunteer opportunities for students. But forced volunteerism by government isn't volunteerism, it is servitude.
It is great that you learned a lesson from the Government forcing you to do something. But just because you learned a good lesson from it, doesn't mean that is the best solution for teaching the same lesson to others.
American society has never been about working together is you don’t want to, it is only about freedom and rugged individualism!
The students retain the fruits of the labor: their education.
They're not doing math problems for IBM, or geography questions for an oil company, or spelling checks for the Washington Post.
How do you think mandatory service is going to affect the high school dropout rate? Especially to a junior who skipped the labor requirements during freshman and sophomore year?
And the "point of school" is not to expose them to "different experiences". It is TO TEACH THE BASIC SKILLS THEY NEED TO GET ALONG IN LIFE such as reading, writing and calcuation.
Good grief. What are we coming to? Reasonable minds indeed!
Juvenile offenders often had a record of minor crimes before getting sent to the residential program. The most popular sentence for these misdemeanors? Community service. So, when I first floated the idea to the kids about volunteering for the barbecue, one of them shot back:
"Volunteer service? Why? I ain't done nothing wrong!"
Er... crickets?
The Company of Young Canadians,a government sponsored volunteer corps, was a flop. In the 1970s, the federal government also ran string of youth hostels,none of which are still operating. The government gave grants to any number of volunteer groups,most which became stridently political.
Its strange that, in the U.S. a country which is known for it volunteerism,anyone would think that this kind of thing was necessary.
It reminds one of the New Deal programs that we copied in the 1970s. Of course, conditions in 1970s were nothing like those in the Great Depression. It goes without saying that, despite all the gloom and doom from the Democrats, the U.S. is not in the same shape as it was in the 1930s either.
Biggest problem with importing that here is going to be transportation. The Japanese walk home or take public transportation - they don't have school buses. A lot of US students, quite literally, have no other way to get home besides that school bus. Requiring them to stay after school is requiring one of their parents to come get them...
Back to the main issue... It's not like I didn't do any community service back in the day. I was in Teen Court, I was in the Scouts, I built a bridge for a service project. (Didn't actually file for Eagle - they don't cotton to agnostics - but even if I didn't actually get it, I earned it. ;p) But it would have been pretty darned annoying to have had to document hours spent here or hours spent there! I'd have probably done less of it if I were just trying to tick off a box on the appropriate form.
On top of that, what happens when school administrators don't approve specific forms of service? "Sorry, your church volunteer work doesn't count, we only count officially approved government volunteer work"? Great, more lawsuits, that's exactly what we need.
Michelle Obama’s speech at UCLA 3 Feb 08:
Like the Gambler says: "Read them, and weep".
But does that mean we can scale this up to a national level and get the results to increase in proportion to the number of people enrolled? I would tend to doubt it.
I know I read a book about this at some point, and the author may have been with the Harvard School of Public Health. It was about providing free government money to successful nonprofits in order to make them bigger and help them serve more people. One of two things always seemed to happen. Either the enlarged nonprofit captured the funding agency to keep the money flowing (a sort of a charitable-industrial complex), or the funding agency captured the nonprofit and turned it into another government bureaucracy. Whatever was innovative and tailored to local circumstances got squeezed out by the latter process.
If it's free labor rather than free money, I suspect that the latter would be more likely. Whatever agency approved the service programs would eventually develop a formula, and kids everywhere would be stuck doing the same make-work projects. Regardless of local need. Treating everyone the same is mostly a virtue in government, but in this case it isn't.
And then there's the question of how useful all this unskilled labor will be, especially at younger ages. I suppose the older kids could do physical work, but does anyone else remember how hard it was to shovel snow before they got their adult height and musculature? I suspect it would make more sense to hire people in their late teens and early 20s, train them properly, and let them do real projects that they could focus on for an extended period of time. Maybe something like, I don't know, Americorps?
At some point, the voluntary program will step on the wrong toes or will impact on someone's turf. For example, what will the teachers unions say when a state sponsored project for high school kids starts sending them into elementary schools as unpaid tutors. After all, isn't it likely the union will think that only paid, dues paying memebers should have that role.
The idea may sound great to some out of Obama's mouth, but it affects too many entrenched Democratic constituencies.
According to this article, Kurtz's actual words were: "Obama assumed the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office, and almost certainly received the job at the behest of Bill Ayers."
NY Times
Housing the poor is a thorny issue:
1. We don't want the poor to live in dumpsters.
2. The top-down, public housing model has failed completely. The high rises built post-WWII have almost universally been torn down.
3. The bottoms-up, community-organized public-private model fails when crooks and/or incompetents try to manage the housing.
4. The assumption is that developers/operators of market-rate housing will not house the poor, because it is unprofitable.
Also, do we have a reason to think that helping other students in a library would not be considered appropriate service work? I saw nothing to suggest that.
One would think you would support this kind of measure, if only to see local communities give up reliance on federal funds. Or perhaps you'd rather see unfettered access to federal funds?
My comment was not meant as you take it; it was, indeed, a reducto ad absurdum.
I'm not Sarcastro; I'm a libertarian; and I've been commenting on this site for two years. The latter should have given you a clue as to every previous statement.
And why is it OK to question the patriotism of a teenager who wants to work at McD's in his spare time, but it's a horrible thing (and racist!) to question Obama's patriotism?
Forcing teenagers to clean up at a nursing home is not activism. It may be a bit educational, but I'll posit the nation as a whole would be better off by requiring an additional high school course in Economics than by having kids pick up trash by the side of the road.
When it comes to volunteering, I read that he is proposing a kind of larger-scale United Way style matching of willing volunteers with appropriate programs. How this gets translated into mandated labor like cutting sugar cane is beyond me. No evidence that this is what he has in mind, and no evidence that we would indeed fall down the slippery slope to commie work programs because we've encouraged more people to voluntarily engage in service. The proposal specifically talks about the current problem that many people wish to serve, including this large retiring baby boomer population, though we have few effective ways of matching up their talents with the opportunities.
Now, back to the required service learning proposal for a moment. Service learning is not about teaching morality, any more than the forced practice of civics or hand-washing or rope-climbing is about teaching morality. Service learning is also about learning, not just about things like picking up trash because it makes somebody feel warm inside. The argument is absolutely NOT that "compulsory performance of a service that does good is okay, because the result is a perceived net benefit." The argument is that compulsory performance of the service is good because it improves learning and academic performance and graduate rates. How so?
Most students will learn a language better when they can practice speaking it with native speakers. Most students will learn math better when they can teach it to someone else or put it into practice solving real problems. Most students will become better critical thinkers and managers when they have to practice organizing and executing a project themselves. Learning by doing is not the only way of learning, but it is a powerful reinforcement of other methods and most students retain information better when they can have this sort of practice. Don't trust me--plenty of empirica