"Required" public service? Is it hazing?

[hoosier]

I agree with this CT newspaper editorial. Forcing someone to do something would be hazing, if XYZ chapter of GLO did it.

EDITORIAL: Colchester (CT) school board mandates public service


By: July 05, 2002


Mandating public service is forced labor which is no longer volunteerism.
It's unsettling how the exposure to feel-goodie, do-goodie, fuzzy-wuzzy liberalism can sometimes be much like crawling through the paddle run at a fraternity rush.
These days, it's a whack here and a whack there from the post-Clinton, post-9-11 neo-liberals who are increasingly imitating neo-conservatives in proposing and enacting bothersome new laws that mandate us to pledge the allegiance, worship the American flag, subsidize religious institutions or donate some of our spare time to those in need.
Because elected officials often do ridiculous things to children -all in the pious name of education - that they wouldn't dare do to adults under any circumstances, the Colchester Board of Education recently voted to make 10 hours a year of so-called "community service" a requirement for high school graduation. In a 3-2 vote, the school board decided that teenagers, in the manner of indentured servants, should be required to perform tasks normally funded by taxpayers or performed by volunteers who have a far nobler purpose than pleasing elected do-gooders. (Remember Rev. Sung Young Moon's mandate to smile and all the thousands who complied?)
In their narrow and foolish vote, the board has managed to:
1.Permanently degrade and corrupt the meaning of local "community service."
2.Forever guarantee that the town of Colchester can never again proudly point to a wealth of "student volunteers."
3.Completely disregard free will and individual rights (both too easy to do when it comes to minors) which includes the inalienable right to be selfish, to not want to "volunteer" and/or not be part of a social experiment that is really an insidious reversal of child labor laws.
4.Guarantee that future generations of Bacon Academy students will have a perverted, if not cynical, view of what it means to perform public service.
5.Infringed on student's private lives by dictating the use of their private, off-school time.
6.Failed to logically state why any governing body would mandate something which was already occurring naturally.
7.Put Bacon students on the same level as those (usually donning orange jumpsuits) whose "public service" is also mandated - by the state Department of Corrections.
Luckily for opponents, the school board's new mandate fails to address their main concern which dealt with precisely when this volunteer work is to be done. This surely opens the door to a court challenge to determine if any school board can dictate "extra-curricular" activities and whether such activities can or should ever be used as a graduation requirement. There could also be a court challenge on the issue of mandating "volunteerism."
Ironically, attorneys who specialize in tort, labor, civil rights and Constitutional law and those pesky trial lawyers seem to be more esteemed by liberals and are usually the bane of neo-conservatives.


©Regional Standard 2002