Obama's Vision of Mandatory Volunteerism

GUEST COLUMN

BY ANTON KAISER

It seems to be getting harder and harder to find out what is going on in liberal politics these days. Despite the World Wide Web, reports from our American mainstream media simply dull the senses.

Take for example this nugget from Obama’s speech on national service last Wednesday at the University of Colorado. He promised that as president he would "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."

Like so many other federal education programs, he would enforce this social service program by withholding federal education dollars if it isn’t complied with. But what kind of bureaucracy will be required to implement and monitor such a program? Who decides which service programs qualify? And what does national service have to do with education anyway?

In the past, volunteerism and community service have been a freedom, an elective choice. Kids, in accordance with parental control, could collect money for UNICEF on Halloween or fill their bags with candy. It was their choice. Even national military service has been made voluntary. But now we need a military-style draft to force our children into national service even before the age of emancipation? And parents will have to chauffeur their kids at personal expense to meet these mandatory government demands because their school needs those otherwise denied federal funds?

Why doesn’t the media jump all over these kinds of political statements by liberal candidates? When Bush proposed the same thing for academic standards, something actually related to education, they had a fit. But when Obama proposes socializing our schools, something that has nothing to do with academics, those same keypads suddenly go silent. Why?

Might I suggest that teaching politics in our schools through forced participation in selective social service programs is just fine as concerns the liberal mind. Witness our overwhelmingly liberal colleges. And enforcing a mandatory national service program in our secondary schools simply expands that agenda, opening yet another liberal gateway into the minds of our youth--and for the same political purposes.

Anton Kaiser was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and retired in Rapid City after serving twenty-seven years as a U.S. Army infantry officer. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point, and holds Masters Degrees in Business and in Public Administration from Webster College, St. Louis, MO. He is also a veteran of Vietnam, Berlin, Operation Just Cause (Panama) and an honor graduate of the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS.