So, my mother tells me that Fairfax County Public Schools will require 40 hours of community service before graduation beginning next year. Which matters a little, because you know not to Ron Burgundy you, but it’s the twelfth largest school system in the country and one of, if not the best systems. And it’s next to D.C., so Lord knows we’re just gifting a little example to Rahm Emanuel and his Voluntary Civilian Corps to Make Glory of Motherland.
Now, last week, I actually argued to someone that I was comfortable with individual schools rather than the federal government mandating students complete community service to graduate. But, after considering this more, I’m having a Come to Jesus moment: The government, and by extension the schools, need not be in the business of mandating community service. Let me break it down for you.
1. Volunteering is…voluntary.
This is the argument that matters first and above all others. If we condition people to wait for the government to force them to “volunteer,” then we’re losing the spirit of charity. On a core level, I resent laws that compel me to do things. That’s American. You can do whatever you goddamn well please.
2. This is the parents’ responsibility.
Whatever your parents do, you usually end up doing yourself. A good healthy sense of duty and volunteerism starts with your mother dragging you somewhere on a Saturday morning. Creating compulsory service offers a disincentive for parents to act as their own volunteer force in their children’s lives — and their own. If the school assumes this kind of role, doesn’t the perceived need to be involved in PTA and the like diminish accordingly?
“Parents have fallen short,” government compulsory service says, “but don’t worry, we will correct the situation by stepping if for you. Don’t worry. We’ve got it.”
Comforting, one supposes.
3. Remember how lame social or community education was?
Nothing — nothing — will ever top the Driver’s Ed video about getting off the phone when driving through construction zones, because you could hit a construction worker, he could die, his wife and two children tossing a football underhand would be told by state troopers, and you would not make the cheerleading squad, attend prom, or go away to college. Because you’d be in prison.
Schools handle all the non-school stuff terribly. Especially when it comes to character and morals.
My mom reminded me of “Character Ed.” In elementary school, we had character education imposed upon us, because we weren’t receiving proper moral values training in the home or something. Thus, embittered teachers and zealous parents alike forced the Six Building Blocks of Character (Honesty, Respect, Responsibility, Courage, Cooperation, and Caring) which all had corresponding colors — including, hilariously, yellow for Courage. When these powers combined, they formed “Character Ed,” which can only be described as a flamboyantly dressed zombie cat. It might have been a little lizard in a technicolor dream coat wearing a hat. In the face, it looked somewhat — I’m not even kidding — like this:
It was ugly. (I wish I had a photo of it so we could attach it to posts about Social Justice, COMMUNITY, and the new liberal puritanism.) And it didn’t work. They got rid of it a few years after I was in elementary school. Third graders do not wonder to themselves, “Why, I don’t think I’ve engineered my courage and caring in proper proportions or with the finesse befitting an upstanding and moral citizen of the earth,” just because a magical caterpillar in a hat said so.
Schools need to focus on the fundamentals; Sir Walter Raleigh might be boring, but it doesn’t matter if everybody hates hates hates Sir Walter Raleigh on Katy Perry, fluorescent lighting, people who don’t do the little rear-view mirror wave when you let them in levels — it does matter if everybody has some latent resentment towards community service. Sometimes, kids fall through the cracks; for every kid we might save from slipping, we might inadvertently knock another one down — it’s not a technicolor dream to imagine freshmen smoking pot and/or setting fire to something because it looks cool before going to some kind of mandated service.
4. Teenagers lie.
Did your high school gym class have “Fitness Logs”? Where you had to write down the workouts you did over the week, each week? We did, and everybody lied about them. Though I run all the time now, I rarely got the cardio workout I was supposed to be getting during high school (you don’t really do a sustained 30 minute high intensity cardio workout at most softball practices). So, every other Wednesday morning or whatever, everyone would be in the locker room, writing out their fitness logs, and forging their parents’ signatures. REALLY SOLID moral behavior.
In middle school, we had to do community service. Everyone found ways to get around it — and a lot people’s parents enabled it. A lot of people worked at the library, to the point where the shift people signed up for would be months after they did so. When you’re under sixteen, there isn’t much you can do; you can’t participate in Habitat, you can’t give blood, you can’t drive yourself anywhere. The result: Precariously high resentment levels and the service that got done was mildly to moderately pointless.
This is about principle and practice. On principle, schools should be educating students in the classroom, and leaving the outside world to parents, particularly in the realm of what should be VOLUNTARY actions in a free country. And in practice, a school forcing teenagers into an activity usually involves animosity and lying and probably a lot of fake, pointless “service.”
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