Is it right to force high school students to do community service in order to graduate? Isn’t that a violation of Constitutional rights? Last time I read the Amendments, number XIII read
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. "
Unless I’m mistaken, this means either,
a) School is being un-Constitutional, or
b) School is a form of imprisonment.
Either way, I still want to know.
The high school I went to tried to make us do fifty hours of community service but they were stopped by some law or another. Instead, they instituted “service learning”, which is community service but you have to tie it to one of your classes and write a paper on it. It was legal because it tied to our classes, or something along those lines.
Really? Our school hasn’t done anything like that. Ours is seperate, and 40 hours is required, but more is voluntary. I really oppose this. Is there nothing I can do to stop this tyranny of the schools? And another thing… (I’m ranting now!) why is it that some people get "free"lunches from school, and come in and buy “extras”, such as pop,candy, cookies etc. that totals more than the free lunch costs to us?
If I’m reading your OP right, nobody is “forcing” you to do anything. You may be obliged to attend school, but there’s no law that says you have to do any work at all … or that you have to get a diploma.
Schools have the right to set their own requirements. You have the right to:
a) shop around for another school
b) not show up for community service, and possibly not graduate at all
c) suck it up and deal.
I recommend the third option, but it’s your business.
In my high school, we didn’t have to do community service, unless you were in the IB program. Then you had to do 150 hours before graduation if you wanted the IB diploma. I did not do this, though I was in that program. Not because of some grand ideology or pureness of heart, I was just friggin lazy, I’ll admit it. The consequence was I just got a normal diploma. No firing squad at dawn (at least not the way I tell it. My parents, now…)
Moral of story, do the crime, do the time.
I do not think that schools should try to instill morals upon their students. Why do liberals get their panties in a bunch over school vouchers for religous schools becasue they might create undue entanglement between religion and government? Religion is simply a moral system and I think that forcing students to do community service to get their degres is just as absurd as forcing prayer upon school children.
But the liberals have no problem when instilling THEIR morals?
You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.
At least some schools are now calling it community service. What makes me grind my teeth is not the concept, but when a program is touted as In order to foster the spirit of giving back to the community, we require each student volunteer… The word volunteer does not = require. And they wonder why the students do poorly in English.
As for the original poster, what, you’re rejecting any chance to go off-campus?
Locally, the issue caught fire when a Boy Scout tried to count towards the high school requirement some of the community service hours that he served as a Boy Scout. In the beginning, the high school denied them. I’d still like to hear an explanation of that logic–that would get past the first personal re-examination.
Damn, I should have tried to count my Boy Scout service.
Felinecare: I think part of the point of required community service is that some of the people who are required to do it may end up enjoying it (or at least they’ll see its not so bad), and so continue doing real volunteer work.
While that’s a commendable ideal, Hunsecker, I honestly doubt that it’s going to happpen-this is one reason why I don’t support High Schools having such a requirement. I have done volunteer work, and enjoyed it, but if I’d had to do it for school, theres no way I would have enjoyed it nearly as much. (The other reason that I don’t support it being required is that I still believe(being misguided and naive) that High Schools are for, well, academic learning, and not teaching civic duties, morals, blah blah blah. (of course, I seem to be in the minority here(with this opinion that is) as apparently High Schools are indeed being expected to be more than academic institutions. (from what I’ve been able to tell they generally fail miserably at anything else, but hey, thats just my experience.))
Being a good bleeding-heart liberal (at least compared to my neighbors), I object to organized prayer in schools because it is exclusionary to those who are not in the majority. I got no problems with teaching morals in schools; I think teaching morals in school would be a good thing. When can we start? You want to teach my kid that it is wrong to steal, and it is right to give back to the community, be my guest. You want to teach them that sex can cause children, and if it’s your kid, you gotta take responsibility for it, I’m all for it. If you want to use my taxes to teach my son that a person who died 2000 years ago is a diety, I got problems with that.
BTW, I’m a good catholic boy, run the music minestry, and PAY to send my children to a Catholic school. My choice, and I’m willing to pay for it. An educated populace is necessary for successful businesses, reduces crime, etc., so I’m not at all upset that my taxes go to pay for schools for someone elses kids. I want mine to get a religeous education, so I CHOOSE to send mine to a school that incorporates that in the curriculum.
Back to the OP, most kids do not have a choice of public schools to attend; many may not even have a private alternative; most states say that you MUST attend school for a certain period. Considering all of that, I don’t think they can FORCE community service. I kind of like what The Raven’s school does - if you want the Honors diploma, you have to do the community service, otherwise you get the standard diploma.
“The large print givith, and the small print taketh away.”
Tom Waites, “Step Right Up”
Because if you did that, the wealthy people would get better educations, and poor people would only have schools with bad plumbing and no air conditioning.
Do you think a kid with rich parents and a four second attention span in the best school on earth is getting a better education than a home-schooled poor kid who loves nothing more than learning?
And the reason we don’t privatize the schools is beacuse an educated populace is beneficial to the entire population. First of all, if the kid is in school, he ain’t breaking into my house. Second, if a kid is given the opportunity to learn, he will have marketable skils in the future, so he proably will not need to break into my house. Finally, there is a certain amount of education necessary just to survive in this society. Even an illeterate person in the US is able to write his name, (usually) read street signs, etc.
“The large print givith, and the small print taketh away.”
Tom Waites, “Step Right Up”
Libertarian, I am a libertarian too and I have no problem with giving kids vouchers to go to parochial schools, I simply have a problem with forcing ethics on kids. Many parents cannot aford to send their kids to private schools and public schools should not shove morals down somebodies throats.
PTVroman wrote [qoute]Being a good bleeding-heart liberal (at least compared to my neighbors), I object to organized prayer in schools because it is exclusionary to those who are not in the majority. I got no problems with teaching morals in schools; I think teaching morals in school would be a good thing. When can we start? You want to teach my kid that it is wrong to steal, and it is right to give back to the community, be my guest. You want to teach them that sex can cause children, and if it’s your kid, you gotta take responsibility for it, I’m all for it. If you want to use my taxes to teach my son that a person who died 2000 years ago is a diety, I got problems with that.
[/quote]
As long as it is your sense of ehtics, everything is hunky-dory, but other’s ethics? You seem to think that your sense of ethics is universal. As a person who had to go through ethics training, these morals certainly are not universal. In 8th grade we had to make presentations where we twisted arms from our parents’s companies to make them throw up big bucks for a local homeless shelter. Luckily, I had already had a chance to form my own opinon about homelessnessa and I made a presentation about why not to donate to homeless shelters. I suggested that these businesses invest in businesses that catered to the homeless such as Labor Ready which hires temps close to minimum wage from off the street and pays their workers the same day. These businesses prvided real help for homeless that were willing to work instead of simply throwing money at homelessness.
On privatizing schools, how would privatizing schools take away any of the benefits you described above. On the plus side, schools would be forced to compete for students and funding rather than simply getting whoever is in the area. How does improving education hurt anyone.
You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.
You’ve lost me there. As a matter of fact, I don’t think my sense of ethics s universal. Someone being responsible for their own actions SHOULD be a universal ethic. Getting back to the original post, I don’t think forcing them to do community service is right.
On the privitizing of schools - how are they to be paid for? I am assuming that the gov’t is no longer paying. Fine. Taxes are lower. My taxes are now lower. People getting government assistance now have to try to pay for school for their kids. They can’t pay. How does this help them?
Oh. You mean we still pay taxes, but the schools are privately owned and the government sub-contracts them out. This concept has not worked effectively with prisons; why should it work with schools? I decide to run a school; the local town contracts with me to run the school. I do it for two years, running the building into the ground, pissing off all of the teachers, staff, etc. In the process, I save the taxpayers money, make tons for myself, then leave. Now the building is unsafe, there are no good teachers, and the kids aren’t learning. It’s not like there are a whole lot of choices out there for schooling for the average person. The probability of abuse is too great.
“The large print givith, and the small print taketh away.”
Tom Waites, “Step Right Up”
Well, I had a talk with some teachers at school. Most of them agreed with me, actually, and that surprised me a lot. However, one teacher notorious for proving arguments put forth by students down very quickly. He argued that the XIII Amendment counted only for slaves of labor, and school doesn’t count. I said bull. His strongest argument was simply (As many people in this thread have already said) that we have the choice to not graduate. I think I on him over by saying that slaves had choices too, even if their consequences for their choices were a lot greater. (i.e. not working=death) Can anyone else add to my argument on this point, or provide the all-time mother argument that not even a school board council would be able to disagree with?
Well, first of all, everyone at my school was required to do 40 hours of service. Two of my friends actually did enjoy it, and actually did continue it beyond the school requirement. I on the other hand had a less than plesant experience with my “volunteer” work, but I did manage to snag a summer job (for pay) out of the deal. So in a sense, the school exposed us to something that a few people enjoyed, and they continued doing it. Which is pretty much how most HS requirements work. A few people get something out of it, and continue doing that work, the rest of us hate it.
Now as to the purpose of schools, I think that the primary goal of a public school is to make good Americans out of us (this of course, doesn’t apply to any non-'merkins reading this). The biggest part, but not the only part of that is education. So to that end, schools can make us take phys. “ed.”, say the pledge, and yes, do community serivce.
I suspect that the reason we have universal education at all is the need for the gov’t to instill in us some nationalism and teach us our civic duties, and the broad education part came later. This is, by the way, a baseless assertion, and I’d welcome anyone with some solid info.