Education
Because The Schools Have Nothing Better To Do
by Clay Staggs
Barack Obama gave a speech in Colorado recently on the subject of service. You can read the whole text here. I’d like to focus on his comments on service for those in middle and high school:
Finally, we need to integrate service into education, so that young Americans are called upon and prepared to be active citizens.
Just as we teach math and writing, arts and athletics, we need to teach young Americans to take citizenship seriously. Study after study shows that students who serve do better in school, are more likely to go to college, and more likely to maintain that service as adults. So when I’m President, I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year. This means that by the time you graduate college, you’ll have done 17 weeks of service.
We’ll reach this goal in several ways. At the middle and high school level, we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities. At the community level, we’ll develop public-private partnerships so students can serve more outside the classroom.
Much criticism has been leveled at the No Child Left Behind Act, and most of it justified. In my mind, the most insidious thing that it did was to insert the ever-incompetent US Department of Education even further into what has historically been local decision-making where grade school education is concerned. It did this essentially through a bribe: Accept this increased federal funding if you want, but you have to do X Y and Z to get it. No state had to accept the funding, but if they did (as always) there was a catch.
It appears that, if elected, Obama would take that one step further. Federal aid would be dependent on the schools compelling community service from their middle and high school students. I’d like to make two points about this. First of all, the schools have all they can say grace over to actually, you know, teach the students the basics, and many are even failing at that. Is it not absurd to place yet another mandate on these schools? Is there no amount of social engineering that we won’t foist on the public schools?
On top of that, perhaps this is my reformed thinking coming through here, but if “community service” becomes mandatory, does it not lose something of its character? I thought this when Clinton did AmeriCorp - if you’re getting a reward for doing a job (in the case of AmeriCorp, reduced student loan debt) then isn’t that just employment and not true community service? Maybe I’m off base here, but I think of true community service as being at least in some measure voluntary, or maybe done without the motivation of profit. Once we make community service just another course in school, won’t it become about as noble as your 10th grade health class? Maybe it will, and nobody cares. I’m not sure which is worse.
For those interested, Paul Mirengoff at Powerline does an excellent fisking of some other aspects of this text, too.
Exit question: With all the homework requirements, accelerated reading, incessant testing, extracurricular activities, and now possibly mandatory community service, do kids ever get the chance to just be kids anymore?
Posted by Clay Staggs at July 7, 2008 01:39 PM
Well, you and Mr. Mirangoff said it all pretty much. If the schools can’t do what they’re meant to do (educate) well, it’s foolish to think they will do better with more on their plate. In fact, I imagine there’s a pretty close correlation between the amount of federal oversight and the quality of the job that’s done…a converse correlation. I am really afraid of Mr. Obama and all the things he may think up before it’s over.
One of the objectives of education is proper socialization. Who cares about the “nobility” of service?! That’s just code for “you should feel lucky that I would debase myself by doing something productive for my community or someone less fortunate” and its terribly arrogant. Service isn’t about galant self-sacrifice, but about fulfilling understood obligations. Compelling service from those young people who are able to provide it teaches them to repay their societal debts. Anyway, a little work never hurt anyone and most kids could benefit from a little labor.
Amanda,
Let me start with where I agree with you. Kids do need to work. I completely agree there. Moreover, it is desirable for true community service to meet actual needs.
There’s where our agreement will have to end. I am fairly certain that much of what passes for community service these days (and almost certainly would come to pass were Obama’s program implemented) is mere busy work that bears little relation to actual needs of the community. (Mirengoff actually cited an example of his daughter’s school giving community service credit for working in the school store.) Government bureaucrats (like those who would administer this program were it ever put into effect) have little knowledge of the true needs of any given community, especially when perched in DC. Knowing true needs requires a more personal involvement, something that people can do if they care, but that bureaucracies can’t.
Finally, I’ll pick a nit with you about your assertion that one of the objectives of education is proper socialization. As stated, that’s true enough. A thoroughgoing education will socialize the child. The problem is that the schools are having enough difficulties with a basic education, much less a thoroughgoing one. The parents cannot be left out of this equation either, nor can the church. Yet, the responsibility for education, secular or religious, truly lies with the parent. They will (or will not) socialize the child far more than any government program. And, their failure in all likelihood will never be remedied by requiring the student to work at the school store a few hours a week.
Two problems jump quickly to mind: logistics and liability. Can you imagine FINDING 50 hours of community for every middle and high schoolar in Tuscaloosa County; assigning it according to ability, and overseeing them while they do it? Think about transportation alone to all those locations.
My daughter is a dedicated teacher and has taught at public schools in Georgia, Hawaii and Tennessee. She literally loathes “No Child Left Behind” because she said it takes away the ability to teach anything meaningful. She would LOVE this little exercise.
Amanda brings up some interesting topics.
1: Who said that one of the objectives of education is proper socialization? Does it go back farther than John Dewey? (Those are honest questions, not tongue in cheek, by the way)
A note on that, for what it’s worth, is that socialization perhaps meant manners and mores at one point and now seems to mean getting along with peers. The result of ‘peers teaching peers’, is counterproductive, but seems to be encouraged in most modern school situations.
2: Clay’s premise is sound: the schools (in general) can’t educate at this point- there are too many distractions, inabilities, etc. and some among us want to put more on their plate outside of their focal sphere.
We have asked some of the lowest performing University students (most-not all- are in the lower 20% according to a survey I heard this week) among us to sit under professors (many of whom have never taught below college level) who teach a socialist (in the general sense) approach to education. We then send these young folks into a world where they are asked to teach, corral, nurture, discipline and any number of other things. All this without any authority and with all fear of litigation. All this expecting some degree of morals to be upheld without any kind of basis for that structure. In short, we are asking these teachers to parent our society’s kids in the same way that each of us would parent them (or in some cases, to parent them as we wish we could). Now we want them to teach societal debt repayment as well. It’s a tough sell to kids who are on either end of the spectrum either having nothing and are told they owe to the society who has done so much for them, or thinking that society owes them, rather than the other way around.
3: The other thing is that, as in many other things, encouragement/compulsion of service from young people in this type of thing should, ideally, come from any number of places but not the government. The removal of local accountability and the malaise that is generally concomitant with governmental work would seem to be counterproductive.
On a related note, if the government has ANY latitude of conscriptive involvement in people’s lives, military service is one of the few logical avenues and we have decided that, at least for now, the draft is not something we want to do.
More rabbit trails welcome…