Welcome students to the Lake County Gulag!

While attending a NIRPC meeting this last week, I was first introduced to a matter which I had somehow not heard of before, that is of course, mandatory volunteer service for high school students. Now this struck me as odd...I never would have thought that such a policy would ever be implemented by a school corporation in America. I admit my naivety.

Having looked into the matter I found that a number of high schools in the Region have such policies which dictate that high school students must complete a set number of volunteer hours, sometimes upward of 20 per year, in order to graduate. I am not alone in noticing something very wrong with this.

Firstly, I must make it clear that I hate the American education system. The school days are too short, the school weeks are too short, and the summer and winter vacation periods are too long. Oftentimes, students forget all that they learn within just a few weeks. Speaking from experience, I will admit that I will never remember high school algebra or calculus, neither will I be able to even remotely describe the periodic table. Students are not taught nearly enough of the important subjects, such as reading and writing (creative writing and journalism do not count since they do not compare even slightly with the intensity of college writing) and the classics have been shunned in order to implement ISTEP programming and other nonsense.

The real problem, however, is that the schools have begun taking more and more power from the parents. They teach sex education at least 3 times throughout K-12 and that's not including Health and Safety class. What's more, they teach home economics, child development and other courses of which the curriculum is more the responsibility of parents to teach rather than the state. True, many parents have no idea how to raise kids, and they themselves lack etiquette and manners (not to mention a firm grasp of the English language), but it is nonetheless their responsibility to teach their children about sex, growing up, and general common sense. Now, with the policy of mandatory volunteerism, the school has taken away even the parents' right to decide how much work their child shall do outside of school.

Students have one primary responsibility: to learn. This learning cannot be done if enough time is not allocated for studying. Taking students out of the classroom and putting them to work, no matter how long, deprives them of precious time for which they should be devoting their focus to their books. So the supporters of this mandatory volunteerism will state that volunteering will also teach. I disagree. I have worked nearly 8 different jobs and the only time that I ever learned something was my time spent as a horseman on a working horse farm. Jobs do not offer learning, books and lectures do.

But all that aside, this policy of forcing children to volunteer is blatantly illegal. According to the US Constitution (I know, it's been much forgotten as of late), Amendment XIII, Section 1: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." By making volunteer service mandatory, and by not paying the students for their work, the schools have broken the law. They have enslaved students. This method of slavery was often used in the Soviet gulags under Stalin, when people were forced to "volunteer" their service for the betterment of the "community," i.e. communtiy service.

If the schools wish to teach children to become better people, first they should practice following the law and asking students to volunteer instead of mandating that they do. Then, perhaps, the Region will begin to look more like 21st century America and not the 20th century Soviet Union.