Shrugging Off Community Service

High schools are increasingly mandating that students perform social service. But now young people may have the opportunity to learn as much about pluralism as about rebuilding their communities.

While advocates argue about the role, numbers and efficacy of a school-based volunteer corps, one California group is questioning a school’s right to require young people to be involved in the effort.

The Ayn Rand Institute, headquartered in Marina del Rey, a self-styled watchdog of individual liberties, is offering anti-service internships--ones that will allow students to fulfill a school service requirement “while undermining” the notion, the group says.

Using the one-year anniversary of President Clinton’s Philadelphia summit on volunteerism as a call to arms, the institute has launched a “Campaign Against Servitude.”

Starting this fall, students will be able to do their service work with the institute. The work will consist of research and other activities aimed at defeating mandatory volunteer work.

“Volunteerism is designed to turn Americans into guilt-ridden indentured servants--a program and morality more appropriate to a dictatorship than to a nation founded on independence and freedom,” the group wrote in an announcement detailing its “Freedom of Choice” internships.

The institute--devoted to the teachings of writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, a Russian immigrant who came to the United States in the 1920s--maintains that selfishness is not negative, but rather the most rational way to live.

Followers of Rand are hyper-individualists; they do not believe in God, public schools or a governmental system that does anything more than ensure people leave one another alone.

Rutgers University professor Benjamin Barber, the founder of that school’s education-based Community Service program and an advisor to President Clinton on citizenship and community service, dismisses the Rand Institute’s position as a semantic smoke screen.

Barber sees service programs not as volunteering for its own sake, but as part of general education in civics. Requiring students to perform community service is no different than requiring math homework, he says.

“The strategy the opposition uses is to try to isolate and separate community service from the question of curriculum,” Barber said. “But if you put it back into the pedagogical basket where it belongs, then it’s another curricular decision . . . which schools have the right to make.”

Barber hearkens to the history of the public school movement, which began as an attempt to prepare young people for their role as active participants in a democracy.

But to the folks at Rand--who see public schooling as tantamount to government indoctrination of the nation’s young--citizenship training is just an extension of a bad idea.

“What mandated service is teaching is that it’s selfish or evil to pursue your own goals,” said Richard E. Ralston, the Rand Institute’s director of development. “[It] is teaching that it is your duty to serve the government.”

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Across the nation, increasing numbers of high schools are requiring some kind of service commitment from students.

In the Los Angeles region, many schools require service as part of a particular class, as a graduation requirement or as a prerequisite for participating in other school-sponsored activities.

Teachers involved in the programs say the experience has been overwhelmingly positive for the majority of students involved.

Many students have gained confidence by helping others, their teachers say. Some are exposed to new career ideas by working in Legal Aid societies, hospitals and environmental organizations.

Teenagers with no work experience are able to build resumes. And most important to many teachers, the students learn crucial workplace skills, not the least of which are cooperation and proper communication--lessons that transfer back to the classroom.

“It’s been an incredible way to turn at-risk students around because it provides something they can be successful with,” said Steve Zimmer, who teaches English as a second language and is coordinator of Marshall High School’s Service Learning Program. “I’ve seen so much positive come out of this that it has eliminated my fears about having students feel like they’re forced to do something they don’t want.”

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At Marshall High School in Los Feliz, students are required to perform 20 hours of service over the course of their four years in school. The average number of hours each student performs, however, is 63.

“Once they get into it, we’ve found that it becomes something they want to do well beyond their requirement,” Zimmer said.

Edmundo Rodriguez, a Los Angeles Unified School District administrator and former Roosevelt High School government teacher, said he would like to see outside service be made a condition for graduation.

“I think value can often be derived by doing something you ordinarily wouldn’t do,” he said. “I know many of my students would not have been hired to work in the institutions where they volunteered, like a community newspaper or a hospital.”

At Marshall, the requirement can be fulfilled through individual placements with nonprofit organizations and Saturday group projects organized by the school. Students under the constraints of after-school jobs or family obligations often find creative ways of fulfilling the requirement, Zimmer said, such as tutoring other students during a free period.

But it is the classroom-based projects, which serve as field work opportunities, that Zimmer hopes will become the school norm.

These projects might include a biology class that studies the ecosystem of the nearby Los Angeles River, then fulfills a service requirement by leading field trips and educating younger students about the river’s aquatic life and the dangers of pollution.

The Rand Institute’s Ralston--who is no fan of the environmental movement--questions whether such a lesson is appropriate.

“Even the merits aside, it means there is certainly wide potential for ideological abuse in what is considered by the school bureaucracy and the teachers’ unions [to be] politically correct charity and what isn’t,” Ralston said.

The debate about social service requirements goes beyond the Rand Institute and service advocates.

John Seery, a professor of political theory at Pomona College in Claremont, said he appreciates the idea of students working in their communities, but has a hard time with the methods some schools are using.

“It’s ill-liberal liberalism,” Seery said. “It’s attempting to teach initiative and teach those kinds of commitment to the community, teach volunteerism and all those good things but to do so by a method that is at odds with the goal. As soon as you make it a requirement, you take the spirit out of the whole situation.”

Barber maintains that the goal of the programs is to teach citizenship--not do-goodism.

“Democracy requires competent, engaged citizens,” Barber said. “In their absence, we are going to have a serious crisis. This is a mission that has not and cannot evolve, or erode or disappear, without placing democracy itself in peril.”