I understand your point, but tax obligations can be satisfied by paying a percentage of your earnings to the government. As opposed to performing services.
As a practical matter, taxation means that some percentage of people is economically coerced into performing services for the government. But still, it’s not quite the same thing.
So what? The principle I am advocating applies only to situations where people are forced to perform services. I have much less of a problem with forcing people to receive a certain amount of education.
Yes, I know that community service is sometimes sold as being educational. To me, that’s just a rationalization. In any event, if you are forced to perform services which are intended to benefit other people, the opportunities for abuse are a lot higher in my opinion.
In my opinion, a free education through high school should be an entitlement for every child in America (who is here legally.) Thus, in my opinion, it’s unfair to attach strings to that entitlement and pretend that they are voluntary.
You guys can debate whether mandatory service is a good thing. I was merely trying to fight ignorance - the premise of this thread had been that mandatory service was not part of the bill in any way. It turns out that it is, so I cleared the air on a matter of fact.
This is an excellent point that I hadn’t thought of. Surely, though, there are ways to minimize abuse?
I had a high school history class for which I had to do x hours of community service in order to pass the class. A buddy and I got up early every morning for a few weeks in the dead of winter and went to a nearby senior home and shoveled/scraped the snow off all the cars in the parking lot. Our parents signed off that we did this, and there, our obligation was fulfilled.
I guess what I’d be looking for in this debate is an argument why that sort of thing is wrong for a school or teacher to require.
How is ‘must perform community service’ different than ‘must write term paper on book of your choosing,’ or ‘must sign up for two semesters of gym class,’ as far as attached strings are concerned?
Probably, but I’m skeptical that it’s worth the benefit. Anyway, I think it’s fundamentally bad to force people to labor for others. Which isn’t to say I would ban it in all cases, just that it reqires a compelling reason to justify it.
There’s no difference at all, which is exactly my point. In either case, the activity is essentially mandatory. And it’s silly to pretend that it’s voluntary.
But as has been pointed out, mandatory community service is a graduation requirement for a large number of high schools throughout the country and has been for years.
This is not an Obama debate on the merits of his bill, this is a high school curriculum debate.
No, it’s really not. The debate is about HR 1388. That’s the title of the thread. The assertion was made that this bill does not include anything remotely resembling a mandatory requirement. I pointed out one section where it explicitly did, and another section directing the commission to explore ways to expand the mandatory aspect.
As for it being just about school curriculum, that’s not correct either. The first section I quoted talks about engaging out-of-school kids of the same age (i.e. dropouts). It’s non-specific as to whether some way would have to be found to make their ‘service-learning’ mandatory.
However, the second section clearly states that the commission should investigate the possibility of mandatory service for ALL youth. It says nothing about school curricula or whether schools would even be involved in the process.
I’m personally opposed to mandatory service on many grounds. On philosophical grounds, I am not a communitarian. I do not believe that a mandatory part of good citizenship is ‘service’ to the state. I do not believe in teaching children that ‘service’ is expected of them as citizens. What is expected of you as a citizen is to deal fairly with others, to pay your own way through life, and to be a good steward of those things which are only under your temporary influence (i.e. don’t leave a mess for others to clean up). I also believe that any mandatory service requirement is just as much involuntary servitude as is the draft, of which I am also strongly opposed.
I’m not sure it’s even compatible with the U.S. Constitution. The military draft has been fought in the courts many times, and the court has upheld the draft - but only because the Constitution explicitly gives the government the power to raise standing armies in wartime. This does not meet that test, yet it is still involuntary servitude. I suspect there will be a constitutional challenge to it at some point if it passes.
The social construct I believe in says that my role as a citizen is to live by the rules, pay my way through life by engaging in voluntary transactions with other free citizens, and to pursue my own happiness. Voluntary ‘service’ is fine - even admirable. Mandatory service turns the relationship between the state and citizens on its head, and I want no part of it.
But this is a matter of philosophy, and as such not really debatable. However, as a practical matter, I believe that mandatory service is likely to lead to corruption of the process as rent-seekers twist the applications to their benefit, and lead to cynicism among the conscripted youth. I also believe that the education system is already doing a bad job, and piling new ‘service’ requirements onto students and making school districts oversee them is not going to help. I would rather see ‘service-learning’ time spent teaching kids how to read and write.
Furthermore, I see a fundamental difference between this and other curriculum requirements. The school curriculum is supposed to produce adults who are capable of looking after themselves and becoming constructive members of society. ‘Service-learning’ is the injection of a specific political philosophy into the mix - that you cannot be a good citizen of the country unless you learn that you must serve others - that some of your time and money should be spent serving other people rather than promoting your own lawful interests. That is fundamentally different than teaching you how to read and write and even how to vote.
You lose a lot of credibility when you compare a few hours of ladling soup to a military draft.
Your entire argument seems to boil down to “I don’t like community service so it should never be a part of a school curriculum.” Those that are interested in serving their community will do so, those that aren’t, won’t after their 40 (or however many) hours are up. But saying they shouldn’t be exposed to it on Constitutional grounds is just grasping.
I said “In kind, not in degree.” The state simply cannot compel service, or shouldn’t be able to. “A little bit of service never hurt anyone” is not a constitutional OR philosophical argument. How would you feel if, for example, the state waived due process, the Miranda act, and other legal protections so long as the judge only hands out a sentence of a few hundred hours of community service? A little service never hurt anyone, right?
Sam, are ‘youth engagement zone programs’ mandatory? As far as I can tell by reading your cite, they are not. The ‘mandatory’ reference is used only in defining what a "‘youth engagement zone program’ is: it either has 90% voluntary participation, or participation is mandatory. But I see nothing that says it is mandatory for all students to participate in a '‘youth engagement zone program’. It certainly is optional, at least at the district level.
Guilty. :smack:
Sam Stone, I’m not going to pretend that I trust your motivations behind your contributions to this thread. Nonetheless, the evidence I have seen is patently more heavily weighted toward disseminating relevant information than opportunistic partisan sniping at the current administration.
Please consider my snarky post withdrawn.
And BrandonR, thank you for the data point regarding the frequency with which a community service component is a requirement for a HS diploma.
They are certainly mandatory for the students who happen to live in those districts and who won’t have a choice. The bill is very clear that individual schools will not be able to opt out, which means it is at the very least mandatory within a school district.
Whether it in effect becomes mandatory will depend on how many districts join, how difficult life becomes for the districts that don’t, etc.
The 90% thing seems clearly a dodge to avoid the criticism of the mandatory aspect. I can’t imagine a real-world situation in which 90% of the children in a school district voluntarily enter such programs, unless the district puts heavy pressure on the parents or in some other way pressures the kids into the program.
In any event, the point is that there certainly is language in the bill making participation mandatory for some people, and language that suggests the authors would like to see mandatory service applied to all youths across the country. So it would appear that the people on the right who are worried about a trend towards mandatory service are not being paranoid and have good reason to worry.
Or let me ask you… If the Bush administration had tied a major school funding program to mandatory ‘homeland security’ service for kids, and if their bill had language suggesting that they’d like to extend the scope of it to require all children in the country to participate in such programs, would you have had cause for worry? Or would you have shrugged it off saying, “Hey, no one’s forcing the schools to take the money, so who cares?”
No problem. This isn’t a partisan thing with me. I oppose the attempt by any state, anywhere, to force its citizens into mandatory service. I was a strong opponent of the draft, for example, and have been all my life. It has nothing to do with Republican vs Democrat. And in fact, I don’t even know how much Republican support this bill got, but I’m guessing it was plenty. There are plenty of Republicans in government who just eat this stuff up. Straighten out the kids, do them some good, teach them responsibility, yada yada.
Sam Stone, I find myself agreeing with you completely here.
I have no problem with mandating what sort of material should be covered in the school curriculum (provided it doesn’t make room for psuedoscience and religion), but mandating anything outside of the classroom is crossing a line. Public schools are intended to educate the youth, not implement compulsory service in the name of “values.”
Exactly.
The first time I heard about an idea like this was in Rahm Emmanuel’s (and Bruce Reed’s) book The Plan. Big Ideas for America were they described what they called a ‘universal civilian service’ program. They build on the idea that the right of citizenship comes with responsibily and that those responsibilities will make us more competitive, secure, patriotic and make our counry stronger.
His plan called for all people between 18 and 25 to take 3 months of civil defense training with an option to do more service in return for benefits such as college assistance.
Some of the benefits they described were basic disaster (natural or terror) training, increased military enrollments, better educations for a global economy, and that bringing together people of diverse backgrounds would help them to set aside their differences and forge a common identity. I think they consider it a form of nation building.
Students at my school have needed to complete 40 hours of service learning in order to graduate for at least the past 10 years. FYI.
A. Why do you think being out in the community and interacting with different people is *not *“educational”?
B. Isn’t inculcating “values” in the schools part of the Religious Right’s agenda? Or do you support educating young people about only those values you yourself happen to share?
C. For that matter, what “values” do you hold for which helping the community is actually antithetical?
A. I’ll concede that you have a point here. Performing community service could be educational, in the sense that you see how other people live. I don’t think schools have any place mandating things outside of the classroom, though. Even supposing that schools had nothing to do with this and that it was implemented by the federal government, I don’t believe that service is a prerequisite for being a good citizen.
B. You’re right, I think it is in part of the Religious Right’s agenda. I think most of the Religious Right agenda is outrageous, though.
C. Implementing a mandatory service requirement is involuntary servitude. That sounds like an overreaction (and perhaps “involuntary servitude” is a loaded phrase), but that is what mandatory service entails. I believe that good citizenship entails paying taxes, voting as often as possible, and dealing fairly with other citizens. Mandating service is an attempt to inculcate some sort of “communitarian” mindset. There are many other ways to contribute to society, and even your local community, besides performing public service. Furthermore, I think a large part of the age group this is directed towards (no exact numbers, but somewhere between ages 15-21 it seems) would resent this kind of a measure. This age group is already cynical enough of the government. Do we want to aggravate that? Certainly there are lots of people in this age group who would (and do) perform such service. For that, I commend them. I’m saying that there also exists a large part of this population who would not take kindly to this, including me and quite a few other posters in this thread, it seems.
Keep in mind that I say all this as a self-proclaimed liberal in favor of more progressive income taxes and universal health care.