First Speech Before the Dearborn Board of Education

No Sacrifice Speech from Robert C. Nasir, October 13, 1998

One of the greatest challenges facing our children is the inducement to err, to do wrong, motivated by peer pressure.

To a child, if all of his peers are engaged in a certain activity, it takes a great deal of courage, of independence, of rationality, to resist the feeling that he too ought to be behaving like his peers.

Indeed, if it seems everyone else is doing it, whatever it is, then shouldn't he?

Over the last few years, one very dangerous practice has been growing in it's frequency.  It's not happening at every school - yet - but it may be if we are not vigilant.  And I fear the pressure to act as one's peers do is largely responsible.  And the pressure is, as usual, reinforced by emotionally potent, rationalistic though irrational arguments.

Of course, we know peer pressure is not exclusive to our children.

And the behavior which frightens me is coming, not primarily from my children nor yours, but from my peers.

The dangerous behavior is the advocacy of mandatory community service as part of the public school curriculum.

The emotional appeal of this advocacy, the part I believe is motivating many of it's more innocent proponents, is the belief that service to the community is an act of benevolence, of behaving virtuously.  The better people want to see our children as givers, as generous, not as an act of self-sacrifice, but as one who sees the potential value in others, and feels good will toward others as a outward projection of his own self-esteem.

But the real lesson of mandatory community service is that you are in hock for your very existence.

You do not own your life, but are given your freedom as a permission by others, through the State.  You are not an individual.  By and of yourself, you have no right to live.

The more innocent among community service's advocates would deny that this is their message, but note that it is precisely moral feelings they hope to instill in our school children.

This much is true.  Their message to our children is a message of a specific morality.  However, it is not the morality of America - of the right to one's own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.  It is the morality of sacrifice - the cannibal's morality of altruism.

By definition our children are in school to learn - what is it they are to learn by giving of themselves without hope of return?  What would you expect them to learn?

Resentment that they will be forced to engage in un-chosen activities for any and everyone's benefit (except their own)?

Anger that they cannot be trusted voluntarily, of their own choice, to give value for value, to give the world what it deserves from them, which is simply to pay for what they get?

Bitterness that their own desires, standards, and beliefs are to be set aside in the name of some Utopian altruist's dream of a better world?

Weariness that such effort achieves an unreasoning, saccharine pleasure, and deeper inside, nothing but resentment?

Mockery of a program which would try to teach them self-esteem through self-sacrifice?

These and many others like them are the "lessons" of mandatory community service.

Too many school systems have already given in to the peer pressure of hundreds of pro-service organizations which seek to make America a combination dictatorship and charity ward.  Whatever the goals of these organizations, and these range from the simply mis-directed to the horrifying, I urge you to not submit to this pressure.

Not just in the name of the defining virtues that make this country the world's greatest, but for the sake of the souls of your own children.