Posted on 11/07/2008 9:20:01 AM PST by Khepri
America Serves
"When you choose to serve -- whether it's your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood -- you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That's why it's called the American dream."
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. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.
“What happens if you say no?”
Set a federal goal of 50 hours a year for each middle school student and reaching that goal by making federal funds contingent on middle schools requiring their students to serve those 50 hours.
Thus, it would be the public schools that would impose federal standards of coerced service on each child as part of their requirements for graduation. http://volokh.com/posts/1219902544.shtml#421553
It’s already in place in Ontario (Canuckistan). But kids do get to choose what they’ll apply their efforts towards. So we end up with extra teens in our congregation helping us with stocking shelves at a local foodback, visiting nursing homes or driving seniors to their doc appointments. CHOICE is key.
welcome to the new reich
If you say no, you do not get a diploma. I know of one woman’s now 20 year old daughter that still did not get her official diploma. She is in college, though. So, now with the new program, she won’t get that diploma either.
Did you hear, he paid his extra campaign workers in pre-paid Visa gift cards, and short-payed them?
I volunteer for the chore of reloading. In fact, I've already begun.
I don’t see how this will fly. Kids are already overburdened and overscheduled as it is. It would have to be completely voluntary for people to go along.
Slavery, finally reintroduced by a black guy.
Way to go, Barack!
He can make it illegal, but he can never completely shut down homeschooling. As long as I have breath in my body, I will teach my own children. They attend public schools, but their education is far more comprehensive than what they are taught there. Their understanding of history and politics is greatly affected by the experiences of their family members and by our dinner table conversations over the years. Nobody can take that away unless they physically remove our children from our custody.
My parents fled Czechoslovakia after the communist takeover, while my grandparents, aunts and uncles stayed behind. I saw how they lived, and how my cousins were educated. In times of oppression, we may need to be more creative in how we pass along our values to our children. The morning after the election, I woke up thinking about an onion. It grows underground, out of sight, and needs little protective shell as it is protected by the earth. Similarly, some aspects of our lives may become like that onion - out of sight but quietly growing, until the time is right to emerge fully formed.
That's how they always start their calls.
You should included states. No government has a right to mandate ‘service’.
That’s how you get elementary school kids volunteering for planned parenthood,gay rights, and illegal alien rights groups. It undermines freedom and it undermines the American culture.
Its all bad.
They already have something like that in many of the schools here in Louisiana. It’s part of their grade and can’t get certain credits to graduate unless they have done so many hours of community service.
Reagan conservatives prefer to let parents decide what’s best for their own children.
“The forum is infested with trolls now.”
So....you’re a troll if someone doesn’t agree with you?
I think community service is good for our youth. If you don’t require them to do it, they won’t. Besides, it will build their self esteem.
Community organizing’s roots stretch back to the 1930s and Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of Rules for Radicals. But it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious plan to end poverty through massive federal spending that the Alinsky model—grassroots organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood—really took off. Starting in the mid-1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to neighborhood groups, convinced that they knew better than Washington what their communities needed. The federal funds, eventually supplemented by state and local tax dollars, helped create a universe of government-funded community groups running everything from job-training programs to voter-registration drives—far beyond anything Alinsky could have imagined. Some 3,000 local social-services groups were soon receiving government funding in New York City alone. Many were new, but the money also helped turn traditional charities that had operated on private donations into government contractors.
Those who led these social-services groups became advocates, unsurprisingly, for government-funded solutions to social problems. To defend and expand their turf, organizers began heading into the political arena, wielding the power they had accumulated in neighborhoods to build a base of supporters. In New York, operators of huge social-services groups like Pedro Espada in the Bronx and Albert Vann in Brooklyn won election to state and federal posts after heading up large, powerful nonprofits. By the late 1980s, nearly 20 percent of New York City Council members were products of the government-funded nonprofit sector, and they were among the most strident advocates for higher taxes and more government spending. In other cities, too, from Chicago to Cleveland to Los Angeles, the road to electoral success increasingly ran through the government-funded social-services sector. Spending directed to these groups boomed through both Republican and Democratic administrations. “The non-profit service sector has never been richer, more powerful,”former welfare recipient Theresa Funiciello wrote in her 1993 book Tyranny of Kindness. “Except to the poor, poverty is a mega-business.”
Obama began his organizing life in the mid-1980s in a community group whose progress mirrored that of the rest of the industry: the Developing Communities Project, formed on Chicago’s South Side as a “faith-based grassroots organization organizing and advocating for social change.” Though founded with resources from a coalition of churches, over time the DCP evolved, like many left-leaning religious organizations, into a government contractor essentially subsisting on tax money—with nearly 80 percent of its revenues deriving from public contracts and grants.
As a young college graduate immersed in the world of tax-bankrolled activism, Obama adopted the big-government ethos that prevailed among neighborhood organizers who viewed attempts to reform poverty programs as attacks on the poor. Speaking to an alternative weekly on the eve of his 1995 run for state senate, Obama said . . . that “these are mean, cruel times . . . .” He derided the “old individualistic bootstrap myth” of American achievement that conservatives were touting. Self-help strategies “have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda,” he wrote in a chapter that he contributed to a 1990 book, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. (He also depicted leftist community organizing as a harder task than similar efforts by the Christian Right, telling a reporter in 1995 that “it’s always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness and false nostalgia.”) http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_snd-community_activist_president.html
There, I said it.
Tell him what you think, here:
http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact
I thought the following was accurate and appropriate:
I see Barack is reintroducing slavery, by “requiring” “community service.”
http://www.change.gov/americaserves/
We Jews are not so easily rounded up after The Holocaust. Pound sand, you totalitarian slavers.
My ckids don't belong to you and Obama.
If any state wants to implement this, fine that’s what our Federal system is supposed to be all about, but it’s dead wrong for FedGov to try to impose it nationally.
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