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E-PrinceChris Lu ’88 will serve as executive director of President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team, the campaign announced Wednesday.
A Wilson School major and former senior news editor of The Daily Princetonian, Lu has been working for Obama since he ...
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Obama's new website expounds on his plan "to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year." This program is disturbing, representing a new government intrusion into private life cloaked in the patriotic rhetoric of "serving America," and a crowding out of private enterprise by government-created programs using forced labor. So it would seem that the nation's first black president wants us to work for free.
Relevant link: http://change.gov/americaserves/
Good intentions, but not everyone can afford to work for free, something that a wealthy senator may not understand.
Obama has no intention of forcing anyone to perform community service. Not only is such a plan probably unconstitutional (under the 13th amendment), but it would also be strongly opposed by Congress.
What he may do, of course, is make educational grants contingent upon community service, which is not entirely unreasonable. Those who receive support from the government ought not get it for nothing, when they can perform some reasonably service to society in return.
I note with interest that the wording of the website has been changed, no doubt because of the spate of blogs talking about it. (Change...on our position on the issues!) The original full text will be posted above. Nevertheless, the amendment is still troubling.
Grants contingent on community service, while still a matter of government taking money from taxpayers to entice others to do things, is an easier sell. It's voluntary, right? The problem is that it's such a good deal for students that many take part in it. That's $40/hr, more than most of us will make at graduation (minus ibankers, of course), and several times more than a summer internship would pay - particularly for lab slaves. So instead of gaining experience in private industry or academia while in college, he would rather have us jammed into makework government programs. Businesses that rely on summer students will be destroyed, career paths, particularly for poorer students, will he hijacked...and a huge injection of cash into the college environment might simply result in tuition inflation. So now kids of the non-obscenely rich will HAVE to work these jobs, or pay tuition that only increased because of those jobs.
And for secondary school the ploy is even more nefarious. He talks about "setting a goal" to force kids to volunteer. But how will that be accomplished? By the only means that the federal government has - public schools will have their funding cut unless they force their students to perform 50 hours of service a year. Since for most people, public school is the only choice they've got, this amounts to a mandatory service program for every child in a public school in the country.
The original Obama blurb, before he was called on it and cloaked it in nicer sounding language:
"The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year."
We Americans love to criticize how bad things are going, how the government lets us down. We focus in on everyone else's faults but our own, and all while sipping on starbucks coffee. All you people that worry so much about government intruding on our lives seem to forget just how comfortable we Americans are. We want everything put on our laps but go insane the second we are asked to make some sacrifices. Since when did community service become a bad thing? A hundred community service hours divided into a year comes out to about 16 minutes a day. You really believe that an 18 year old should not devote at least 16 minutes out of his day to helping out his community? Lord knows he's wasting hours on meaningless things, i know, im still a college student. Everyone wants change, but no one wants to do any of the changing. Quit your whining. Obama's not asking your children to shlep crates at the docks. And even if he did, it would do your kids some good.
Community service is a good endeavor with good intentions. But imposing community service is not a good idea because there are people that are very poor who cannot afford to do community service. In fact, it costs money to do community service, transportation costs for one.
Most colleges look to see whether an applicant has done any community service. It is not government intrustion into public life. Those who make such claims don't realize the benefits to the student, to meet and help others and contribute to their community. 50 hours a year is less time wasted on playing Xbox or doing facebook.