Here is an essay I wrote for my English class last semester. It is about “Involuntary Volunteering,” the practice in some high schools (and middle and elementary schools as well, which is actually worse) requiring students to complete a certain amount community service in order to graduate. (Community service graduation requirements, or for the Orwellians out there, comserve gradreqs. Doubleplusungood.) Since this was to be an evaluation essay, all I could really say was that they stunk, but the implication is, they shouldn’t be allowed either. So, the essay:

Students should not have to perform a certain number of hours of community service in order to graduate from public high schools.

This is because a good graduation requirement for a public high school should be constitutional and within the school’s legal scope of power, useful and fitting with the primary purpose of the school, and nondiscriminatory.

As a part of the government, the constitutional limitations on schools are usually recognized by the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the Constitution. It doesn’t take much interpreting, however, to see that community service graduation requirements are unconstitutional and, indeed, unethical. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits American citizens from being forced to do unpaid labor without due process of law. These students have committed no crime and faced no trial, and yet they have been sentenced to a choice between unpaid labor or a future with no diploma and limited prospects, simply because they refused to be exploited in this manner. We have a word for this “choice”: slavery.

The illegality of community service graduation requirements should be enough to stop school administrators from using them. Yet the attitudes of many public schools regarding legality or the Constitution are represented by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in her essay “Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong:” “[T]he arguments against service… [are] more strained. The president of the Maryland Teachers Association, for example, claimed that it violated the Thirteenth Amendment. What’s really bothering the educators? Probably the fact that they would be required to change their teaching methods”—apparently a “claim” of unconstitutionality holds no water for her, at least.

However, the constitutionality of these requirements is not the only weak point. For instance, requirements should fit in with the purposes of the school. It would be silly, for example, for coaches to work with people to be swift track runners and then base all of the awards at the track meet on an I.Q. test, or for automobiles to be built for convenience and safety and then rate them according to the usefulness of the seat cushions as rose fertilizer. So, if a school’s primary purpose were to train the next generation of litter lifters, food-bank-canned-food shelvers, and soup-kitchen workers, a community service requirement would make sense. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. Arguments that schools should teach (white, middle-class Protestant) values—indeed, that thinking that expecting students and the community to ignore over a century of slavery-free America in order to force students to pick up litter by the roadside would teach those values—only make sense if you don’t look too closely. A school’s primary purpose is to prepare students, through education, to be physically, mentally, and emotionally fit for life. As a government-run, largely compulsory institution, there is no requirement—there cannot be any requirement—for schools to make students morally straight as well as physically strong and mentally awake. If students want to be reverent, clean, cheerful, and all the rest, they can join the Scouts.
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