In The State of the World's Children 1997, UNICEF reports that "Romania has launched a pilot project in Bucharest to give juvenile offenders who would normally be sent to reform school the opportunity to remain with their families, receive counseling by social workers and carry out community service work in public institutions." Curiously, this penal reform would require youthful miscreants in socialist Romania to be treated in much the same way an ever-increasing number of school districts treat law-abiding American high school students. Across the nation, students are being sentenced to "community service" as a prerequisite for a high school diploma -- and Bill Clinton seeks to make community service part of every high school education.

"Good Citizenship"

The Goals 2000 Act dictates that "all students will be involved in activities that promote and demonstrate good citizenship [including] community service...." During last April's Presidents' Summit on America's Future, Mr. Clinton issued a "challenge [to] schools and communities in every state to make service a part of the curriculum in high school and even in middle school." "There are many creative ways to do this [such as] putting service on a student's transcript or even requiring it, as Maryland does.... [E]very young American should be taught the joy and duty of serving and should learn it at the moment when it will have the most enduring impact on the rest of their lives." Henceforth, he asserted, students must be taught to consider themselves "citizen-servants."

Bill Clinton is an individual who avoided military service and whose brow has never been moistened by the sweat of honest labor. Yet during the Philadelphia summit, he issued a call for American youth "to enlist in America" by becoming part of what he has described as an "army of ... young people restoring urban and rural communities and giving their labor in exchange for education and training."

"I'm here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America," declared Mr. Clinton in Philadelphia. "I want the children here ... and all over America -- if you're asked in school, 'What does it mean to be a good citizen?,' I want the answer to be, well, to be a good citizen, you have to obey the law, you've got to go to work or be in school, you've got to pay your taxes and, oh, yes, you have to serve...."

Although many supporters of the concept describe national service as a way to address "unmet needs" in the education and welfare system, for Mr. Clinton it is primarily a way to "change the culture and the life in which people live." In a 1994 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, Mr. Clinton stated that national service "literally has the potential to revolutionize the way young people all across America look at their country and themselves." He returned to that theme at the Philadelphia summit: "Before they have their own families, the young can make a unique contribution to the family of America. In doing so, they can acquire the habit of service, and get a deeper understanding of what it really means to be a citizen."

In other words, national service is seen by Mr. Clinton as a means of teaching students that the state must intervene to solve the nation's social ills and that, consequently, their duty to the state transcends any other loyalty. Newsweek correspondent Steven Waldman, who has carefully followed the progress of Mr. Clinton's national service initiative, points out that the President grew up in an era when "government was considered an effective -- even noble -- way to change society" and that he considers national service a way to "re-establish faith in government."

Old Idea

Mr. Clinton is certainly not the first collectivist to exalt the notion of the "citizen-servant." The Communist Manifesto asserts the "Equal liability of all to labor," calls for the "Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture," and requires that "Free education for all children in public schools" be combined with "industrial production." Vladimir Lenin's revolutionary Bolshevik regime institutionalized these Marxist tenets in the Young Communist League.

In an October 2, 1920 address to the Young Communist League, Lenin promised the youthful cadres a "new communist upbringing ... against the self-servers and small owners, against the psychology and habits which say, 'I seek my own profit and I do not care about anyone else.'... The Young Communist League should be the shock group which, in every job that has to be done, gives a hand, displays initiative, makes the start. The League should be such that any worker may see that it consists of people whose doctrines he may not understand, whose doctrines he may not immediately adopt, but whose practical work, whose activities, prove to him that they are the people who are showing him the right road."

Like Mr. Clinton, Lenin maintained that every student be "taught the joy and duty of serving":

We must organize all labor, no matter how dirty and arduous it may be, so that every [individual] may regard himself as part of that great army of free labor.... The generation that is now fifteen years old ... must arrange all their tasks of education in such a way that every day, and in every city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of the problems of common labor, even of the smallest, most simple kind.

In his 1976 study of Soviet polytechnical education, Vladimir Turchenko pointed out that, in compliance with Lenin's decree, Soviet schools required students to "participate with adults in voluntary public work on city and village improvement, in cleaning up parks, in 'green patrols,'" and in other state-defined tasks intended "to take care of nature...." Turchenko could just as easily have been describing contemporary American students who are required to minister to the needs of "Mother Earth" as a way of meeting community service requirements.

Hitler's Vision

The concept of "citizen-servant" was also a key tenet of the National Socialist version of collectivism. In a 1933 speech, Hitler insisted that "the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual." According to Hitler, the noblest German attribute was a quality called pflichterfulling or "fulfillment of duty": "It means not to be self-sufficient, but to serve the community." One favored Nazi slogan was "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz!" ("The common interest before self!") Nazi author Friedrich Sieburg offered this summary of the Nazi ethos: "There are no more private Germans; each is to attain significance only by his service to the state, and to find complete self-fulfillment in this service."

Like Clinton's Americorps and Lenin's Young Communist League, the Hitler Youth were to serve as missionaries for the collectivist state. "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing," Hitler announced in a May 1, 1937 speech. Hitler had earlier acknowledged that indoctrinating Germany's youth in his preferred version of collectivism was one of his chief ambitions.

"When an opponent says, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already,'" Hitler declared in a speech on November 6, 1933. "What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."

The dramatic growth of the Hitler Youth illustrates how quickly such a movement can metastasize. In 1932, the last year of the Weimar Republic, the Hitler Youth numbered a mere 107,956 in comparison to the more than ten million German youth involved in non-political associations (such as the Boy Scouts). By 1938 -- five years after the Nazi party's ascent to power -- the ranks of the Hitler Youth had swollen to 7,728,259. In 1939 Hitler made membership in the organization mandatory by enacting a law conscripting all German youngsters into it. Notes leftist historian William Shirer, "Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken from them and put into orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled" in the Hitler Youth program.

"Voluntary" Servitude

In similar fashion, the Clinton Administration's relatively modest national service initiatives are the harbinger of compulsory universal service. "All the people I know who are driving for a form of national service, primarily want it to be compulsory," warned Martin Anderson of the Hoover Institution in the November 29, 1992 Boston Globe. "They realize that's a terrible problem politically, so they're not willing to say it. It is endangerment of freedom and the potential for indoctrination that skeptics do not like in the national service concept. However benign the program, some think it will not succeed on any meaningful scale unless it is compulsory."

One of the most forthright advocates of compelled "volunteerism" is Scott Shuger, a consultant to the federal government on National Service. Shuger recommends that the federal government "make national service mandatory and assign the Selective Service System the task of locating 18-year-olds and matching them with national service slots." Writing in the January 1996 issue of The Washington Monthly, Shuger insisted that a program of domestic conscription "could be putting the vast unused talents and energies of our citizens, especially those between age 15 and 30, to work systematically on our country's most pressing social needs -- in schools, daycare centers, environmental projects, hospitals, drug clinics, nursing homes, the criminal justice system, and so on." Of course, with the state and not the citizen-servant deciding what qualifies as service, this litany of "pressing social needs" most assuredly would not include peaceful pro-life sidewalk counseling or protecting private property rights.

Shuger also maintains that "having organized service programs in which mostly young people of all racial, ethnic, and economic groups work side by side for a clear, common purpose would help overcome the very un-American barriers that have sprung up between these groups in the past generation."

While social engineers like Shuger might be enchanted with the prospect of a national program to conscript the "talents and energies of our citizens" to serve a state-defined "common purpose," Americans who cherish individual freedom and retain some understanding of the proper role of government must do our nation the service of resisting compulsory "volunteerism."

The implications of state-mandated "volunteerism" are obvious to Thomas Moralis, the father of two straight-A students denied high school diplomas for their refusal to comply with a "community service" requirement. "What they're trying to do is enslave our society by taking our children's rights away," Moralis observes. "Young people who go through these programs learn to submit, and later on they won't mind giving up a few more of their rights when the government says it's necessary."

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