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Amy Charters' First Anti-Servitude
Speech
Before the Dearborn, Michigan Board of Education
from October 13, 1997
Good evening members of the board of education.
I am here tonight to help you understand that implementing mandatory community service for high-schoolers is immoral. This idea was proposed at the last board meeting, which I am appalled by.
A student's life or ANY part of it is not public property. It is not the property of the school, the state, or the community.
Mandatory service would present high-school students with an unjust ultimatum--work and serve without pay OR do not graduate with a diploma or honors. If it is wrong for an employer to tell an employee to work without pay, what is the difference if the coercer is a member of the board of education? None, except he has no choice. He can quit a job, but he is legally forced to go to school.
If this is so evil as it sounds, then why is this idea accepted as moral? Because the idea of living for the sake of others--altruism--is accepted as a moral. It is commonly accepted that a person gains moral worth by helping the needy. But need does not give someone the right to dispose of any part--or any minute--of another person's life.
The needy must rely only on the uncoerced charity of those who are interested in them. And those who are interested have no moral right to demand that students sacrifice any part of their lives to help them.
I hold that a student is moral if he lives for his own sake becoming a productive, self-sufficient individual, and immoral only if he violates the same right of anyone else. His life is his own and no one else's.
His community is not obligated to serve him. Likewise, he is not obligated to “give back to his community”. The occupants of a nursing home or a soup kitchen are owed nothing by a student. The individuals that make up a community are owed nothing by a him unless they had dealt with him as an individual.
Under a program of mandatory community service, student’s lives would literally be stunted. At a time when it is important to study to become self-sufficient, he is told that he must devote hours in service to the needy if he wants to graduate--graduate meaning if he wants his countless hours of hard work and study to be rewarded with coercion to serve the community.
Let me remind you that community service, up until now, has been used as a punishment for criminals.
I urge all of you to ask yourselves if mandatory community service is moral. Recognize and take action on the principle that a student's life is his own and no one else's. Teach the students, in the name of justice, that the products of their efforts are their own to keep and not to be given back to their so-called community. Give them the guidance they need to become purposeful and rational adults.
Let me remind you that this is what you are here for, and only this. Coercive service to the community is not your business. Cognitive development is. Thank you very much for your attention.
