Mandatory service from President Obama

Civics is an element of our education that it is clear we neglect at our peril. It makes absolute sense to require volunteer work as part of any educational program.

It makes absolute sense to require volunteer work as part of any educational program.

Er ... It actually makes no sense to "require" a "volunteer" anything. "Mandatory" and "voluntary" are not synonymous. :D

If only Republican cyberwarriors had been compelled to put their lives where their words were.

Just as I am sure liberals will when Rahmbo convinces the Lightworker to send our military into Iran.

What we weren't fast enough over in PolCon? :)

>2 jlelliott: As everyone here knows, I have trouble seeing the internal logic of liberal positions. Are we for or against compelling people to do work they don't want to do?

There is no abstract principle of which liberals hold constant. If it feels good, do it.

>6 Madcow299:
I thought just our small cabal of right-wing plotters would be aware of it over there on Poli Conserv. I started this thread right around the time that everyone started jumping in.

>4 theoria:
I don't get this post.

Interesting, it's just another form of legislating morality. Creating a Classroom Corp - Good. Requiring participation - Bad.

-3 Of course I was using the standard definition of "volunteer work", which translates to "work for which you are not paid". As mentioned before, most of the middle and high school districts which I have come into contact with mandate "volunteer" work, and no one seems to be confused by the apparent oxymoron.

-11 I disagree because we are talking about children and about civics, not morality. You cannot expect children to automatically do what is going to be best for their education, which is why we require them to do their homework rather than just suggesting it. No one is going to tell them exactly what to volunteer their time to, so morals do not come into the picture. As a democracy, it is vital that we teach out citizens to be involved in the community.

11>

So, to use an analogy, requiring that kids "go to school" is okay but requiring them to "participate" in school (take tests, do homework, answer a question when called upon) is bad? Where do you draw the line here?

Can you explain the "Lightworker" comment to me, Cody? I'm feeling a bit slow today.

By the way, do my kids get to be conscientious objectors to this? Or is that only for service that liberals don't like?

No offense, Carnophile, but you sound like the typical helicopter parent. "You can't make my kids do ANYthing. They don't have to listen to ANYone if they don't want to!"

yeah, cause only liberals object to war...

> 12 I appreciate the clarification. My :D was genuine -- I don't work in a school district and to my ears, "mandatory volunteering" actually does sound weird. I tend to understand the word "volunteer" in the old-fashioned sense of "undertaking something of one's free will," irrespective of whether money is involved or not.

Community projects, internships, practicums (practica?) and the like can have great value and are well established in education (at least at the university level). If schools, educators and families want to expand those opportunities to lower grade levels, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to explore such options.

That being said, Obama's not even in office yet, or building any labor camps, so I'm not sure anybody -- Right or Left -- needs to be hitting the panic button quite yet.

The right just lost an election. They're ready to panic over anything. Now that they've figured out that a little blurb in the transition plan represents a plan to set up reeducation camps across the country, I just worrry that they'll start figuring out Obama's secret plan to take all the guns from the Whites and give them to the Blacks. I've already seen the "plan" called fascist in the other discussion (did I see a Stalin reference somewhere, too?) - before anyone even knows what the plan is.

I just wish they'd had as much righteous indignation over Gitmo (and, to give McCain his due, HE did, the right just wasn't listening to him on that one).

>17 jasonseidner:
Bizarre.

If we're going to require school kids to volunteer, what bounds to we put on where they volunteer?

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned, but you just know that church/state issues are going to come up, not to mention freedom-of-expression and -politics issues. (Can I volunteer at my local church? Scientology center? Planned Parenthood? For a clinic that "cures" gay people? Pro-drug legalization advocacy group? Nudist colony? The local klan?)

The US has an excellent content-neutral system for non-profits. Mandatory volunteerism is going to require governments making content decisions. That really scares me.

-22 Actually, as has been mentioned before, in every district where I've seen this implicated children are free to volunteer for whatever causes they desire (with parental approval, of course). It is not done on school time, so I don't see why schools would have legal or curriculum based recourse for restricting the volunteer options.

I have to say all this paranoia reminds me of the discourse associated with the various options for health care. They have been done before, with non-world ending effects. You can disagree about the costs and benefits, but it is hyperbole to pretend that it is going to destroy the very fabric of our culture.

>23 jlelliott:

That's interesting. I know that, at my school (private), your proposed volunteering had to be approved. The suggestions list had a lot of groups of one slant, but not the other. If the school doesn't require anything other than non-profit status, great. I'm still not in favor of it, but it resolves the most serious problem I have with it.

I think the most serious objection is the effect it will have on the college application arms race... :)

23: Are you sure? Are they able to volunteer for organizations that support the legalization of drugs, or perhaps that support the end of forced labor for children? Would they allow work for organizations that try to eliminate or lower the drinking age? I've seen an awful lot of anecdotal evidence today that those sorts of activities tend not to be accepted by those public schools with such requirements today. And when kids are in college and their mandatory service is paid instead of unpaid, will we all be paying people to proselytize all day?

Oh, oh, oh, I've got the perfect one—NAMBLA!

-24 You know that is probably one of the major valid concerns - that kids are already neck-deep in time commitments and will probably just use the volunteer time to further their applications.

Interesting point about the necessary approval, I think my experience might have been different because they were huge public schools, and it would have been a nightmare to validate everyone (though I can see how checking to make the sure the organization actually exists might be helpful). I of course am in favor of allowing kids to volunteer wherever they like (as long as it is legal and parent approved) but I can see how on a local level schools might make it difficult for children who volunteer for causes that are unpopular.

-25 Is it proposed to be paid work during college? How is it "volunteer" at all then?

27: Because it's not a job, and your "employer" doesn't pay you--the government does. That is, we all do. For a job that wouldn't exist without free labor.

-28 I'm still confused by this. If you get paid for it it isn't volunteer work. I'm paid by the government now, does that make me a volunteer? Did it say somewhere that volunteer time for college students would be paid?

I'm sure some patriotic citizen will volunteer their kid to give Governor Palin geography lessons. I know I would.

29>
I think this was discussed by Obama (and maybe McCain) at the "service summit" at Columbia University on the anniversary of 9/11. Maybe there's a transcript somewhere.

Barack mentioned quite often during his campaign a plan for helping students financially through college in return for military service and/or community service and/or volunteering for the Peace Corps or Americorps etc. etc. Nothing wrong with that. I think it's a good idea.

>7 Carnophile: ". . . I have trouble seeing the internal logic of liberal positions."

It's because the conservative and liberal world views do not mesh. Conservatives, most especially libertarians, are what I think of as extreme individualists. each individual is king. On the other hand, liberals tend toward various flavors of socialism, the community is king and can have requirements of its members. The problem is trying to find a balance between the individual and the community. Without a certain sense of community we devolve into every man for himself and let the devil take the hindmost. What we find when this happens is that yes indeed the devil WILL take the hindmost, and the foremost and everything in between. Consider the French Revolution. Power vacuums do not remain unfilled. Like it or not humans are social animals and require a certain amount of social cohesion to function.

Probably the smartest thing this nation ever did was create the Peace Corps. It raised the visibility of Americans as helpful people who took the time and the effort to learn the culture and language of the people they were going to work with, and then taught them how to fish, so to speak, with no sense of payback to be arranged in the future. Why do you think so many third world countries look to the US as a beacon of liberty and justice in the world, our rhetoric? No, it's because we sent the best and brightest of our young to help them overcome many of the elements that were crushing the life out of their cultures and themselves. Many of the people who will make up the nuts and bolts of the Obama administration are Peace Corps veterans and understand the value of volunteerism. The two years they spent in the Peace Corps did not set them back in relation those with "Better things to do", they were a feather in their caps and, quite frankly, an excellent resume item.

After thirty years of Reaganism, the ideal of volunteerism has been supplanted by the idea that volunteerism is for losers. We're all about me, now. US is a geographical identity of 300,000,000 me's, not a nation working together for the good of all. There is a reason why Ayn Rand is a hero to the young Libertarian and Conservative. She shows what the individual can accomplish alone. That's great, but how much more can we accomplish together? What did John Galt do? He established a community in which each person had their role to play, but it was still a community with rules and requirements of those who lived in it.

We need some method of injecting into our civic life some sense of appreciation for how fortunate we are, and sharing that fortune with the less fortunate. Otherwise, as Chinua Achebe says, Things Fall Apart. We have seen over the last 20 years just a slice of the ugliness that proceeds from extreme individuality. Is that the path we must follow just so everyone can be their own king?

The first time I ran into a Libertarian buzz-saw was more than a year ago when I still frequented the Political Conservatives group, when I suggested a form of national service (a universal draft, at that time) as a means of cementing social relationships and providing a rite of passage to young Americans. Any of you that have ever put your life in someone else's hands knows what I'm talking about here. There's a bond formed that seals you as brothers. This is something we are missing in our culture and without it we will never be one America, nor will we transcend ourselves and become the fulfillment of the dreams of our fathers.