This week's column
They're still quibbling in Chapel Hill over a policy that requires a minimum number of volunteer hours before a high school student can graduate.
Some students and their parents became discombobulated after recently learning that activities they assumed would fulfill the 50-hour requirement may not count after all.
You see, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools rightly distinguish between volunteerism that primarily benefits an exclusive few and volunteerism that benefits the broader community.
For instance, teaching a Sunday school class does not pass muster because it benefits only a handful of people in one church.
The policy has existed for 10 years now, but it has always had more than its fair share of detractors.
"It's hard for me to say, 'I'm sorry, but your service is ineligible,' " an East Chapel Hill High official told the News & Observer of Raleigh.
"I encourage them to get outside their comfort zone. They usually find out something they didn't know about themselves."
Yes, mandatory volunteerism in the public schools is an inherently contradictory concept, but whatever they choose to call it — community service, community involvement, mandatory selflessness — more power to them. Somebody's got to teach it.
Ironically, the dispute arises at a time when the desire to volunteer across the country, and beyond, has reached a zenith.
More than 2,000 local volunteers have stepped forward. Private and government agencies already have spent $200,000 on local relief for hurricane victims. Greensboro is so poised to open its arms to evacuees from the flood- and hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast that its anticipation for someone to help here bordered almost on desperation.
The cots were set up at the coliseum seven days ago. Then they had to be removed. Hurry up and wait. Charlotte and Raleigh had received their homeless and dispossessed. Where were ours?
A trio of local attorneys packed a pickup full of food over Labor Day weekend and barbecued for troops and evacuees in Mississippi. They pointed the truck South and kept driving until they found some people to help.
United Way officials on Friday announced the Operation Greensboro Cares Fund, a giving campaign focused solely on Katrina relief.
The stories go on and on.
So where does anyone get off suggesting that there's not enough compassion around here?
The problem, however, lies more in the length of our attention spans than the depth of our hearts. We'll cry for Louisiana and Mississippi and we'll dig deep to help.
Then somebody else's bride will run away and we'll move on. And we'll forget.
That's why Chapel Hill's forced volunteerism is so appealing.
It makes young people think beyond their own, self-absorbed young realities. It opens their eyes to people beyond their social circles and cultural comfort zones.
And it often puts a face and a name on a community's problems — and opportunities.
In fact, this country without a military draft, without a forced perspective on the costs of war, or anything else, seems less and less grounded in harsh realities.
We are sheltered, coddled, spoiled and sometimes almost choked to death by our own excesses.
So as Katrina daily grabs us by the collar and tries to shake some sense into us, maybe we need to re-evaluate who we are and how we take care of one another.
Remember the quaint notion of a national service requirement?
In the early 20th century, philosopher William James called for a commitment to service and sacrifice in peacetime that mirrored Americans' sacrifices during times of war. Such a commitment, he suggested, should take on "the moral equivalent of war.''
Problem is, very few of us today expect to have to sacrifice even during a war. Go out and buy stuff, we were told in the wake of 9/11. And so we did.
Meanwhile, the idea of national service surfaces from time to time, prompts an uncomfortable discussion, then goes away.
We'd do ourselves a favor if we revisited the notion. It's too easy being an American today. It's too easy to salve our guilt with a rush of compassion before we go back to being complacent and oblivious and more concerned about Jennifer Aniston's latest beau.
Please, give us a national service requirement. Give us something, anything, to keep us focused between now and the next natural disaster.
Comments (5)
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Mandatory volunteerism is an oxymoron. If it is mandatory, it is not volunteerism. It should come from the heart. Mandatory volunteerism would be called "recruiting".
Posted on September 11, 2005 9:08 AM
(long alert)
A copy of James's speech at Stanford that you quote above is here with an interesting note in the preface. "Though some phrases grate upon modern ears, particularly the assumption that only males can perform such service, several racially-biased comments, and the notion that the main form of service should be viewed as a "warfare against nature," it still sounds a rallying cry for service in the interests of the individual and the nation."
So if we allow that James's time and philosophical space (1906) should excuse his anti-women, anti-African American, anti-whatever "isms," only then we can review what he said. (And I'm a BIG Will James fan...really.)
James said, "Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible." (Note: I guess that's changed, eh?) And he remarked, "War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us." (that too, huh?)
But back to volunteerism. It may surprise you that I'm totally opposed to enforced volunteerism. James offered, "But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together..." and he's right. We just call it "blue" and "red" and don't really try to move past it. So why are we attempting to force it onto children in school? If adults can't talk rationally without lapsing into hate-filled speech in news, punditism, and yes, even blogs, how in the heck are we going to force young people (the products of our homes and our opinions) to volunteer in a way that suits a board of education without putting personal (and currently popular) values on the quality of their service?
James also writes that the "fear of the Lord [will] furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy..." Doesn't volunteerism, a la James, connote a religious volunteerism? So why didn't the kid (in your article) get credit for teaching Sunday school?
James, the Greatest American Pragmatist (IMO), describes his own dream with, "I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium." Enforced volunteerism is socialistic, again IMO and in James's, in a political and social attempt somehow to value one's efforts as "OK" or "Not Acceptable" in the eyes of a school officer.
James was anti-war. "...[A]nd I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples." (I think most people are, except when US Military Forces are involved in one and one's patriotism is measured by yellow ribbons affixed to one's car.) He might have objected to a volunteer project that raised money or goods for soldiers overseas involved in what he would have assuredly called an "immoral war." How does that fit with enforced volunteerism that is evaluated by the prevailing philosophical winds of the time? (And we are in a very windy time, Allen.)
So what's James's fundamental view? In his own words, "But that so many men, [sic] by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all, -- this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds." Sounds sort of "communist" to me, or at least I'd expect those right-wing pundits to label it so.
This is what James had in mind for "volunteerism."
"If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." By "whole youthful generation," do you think James was including the "whole youthful Black generation?"
My point? I love a chance to write about philosophy and I'm pretty familiar with Will James's work. And I respect him. But I don't respect taking a single phrase from an extremely long and thoughtful piece to shore up the idea that forcing volunteerism on students is a moral high ground. It omits the fact that James would likely argue that those who ALREADY do the hard jobs should be EXEMPT from the volunteerism "rules" in Chapel Hill.
And I agree with that, not because I don't want kids to volunteer. I want their parents to do so FIRST and I want their actions to make their kids WANT to volunteer. It is not the job of the public schools to enforce a societal equalization onto students (who have no choice but to be there) when it is impossible to accomplish with the "grown-ups" in society.
I once said that I could solve the school prayer issue with one law. "If a company pays federal taxes, then that company MUST start each day with enforced prayer for all employees." As soon as that law is done with its trip to the Supreme Court, then we can require it in "the schools."
Forced volunteerism is worse than an oxymoron and I am opposed to enforcing it with the built-in value judgements that all human beings have.
Posted on September 11, 2005 9:32 AM
It is particularly offensive that a state official would discount sunday school teaching. Inluencing lives in a positive manner is rare and taken for granted as it is. Not withstanding, high school kids who teach in church live under closer scrutiny by their peers as well.
Community service should remain a volunteer based activity.
Posted on September 12, 2005 10:39 AM
Who is to judge what is an appropriate use of a volunteer. Sunday school teachers aren't paid. They may benefit more people than you know. And the benefits of salvation would seem to tremendously outweigh any earthly needs.
I agree with others that mandatory volunteerism just defeats the whole point. I really don't think it is the place of a high school to 'require' such action. I do, think, however, that it is a noble idea to get kids and others involved in service projects.
Posted on September 14, 2005 5:04 PM
Great post, Sue.
Posted on September 14, 2005 5:06 PM