Lobbying school - Education

Reason, April, 1994 by Mark Parenti

Although these groups do provide community services, they also seek to advance political agendas: Planned Parenthood lobbies for tax-subsidized abortions; the Interfaith Peace Resource Council advocates nuclear disarmament. But if any other group wishes to be listed in the service program, the district's regulations say that group "must provide assurances that the organization is free from doctrinal motivation."

EVEN IF THE COURTS REFUSE to declare community-service requirements unconstitutional, Institute for Justice attorney Scott Bullock predicts that the "next generation of lawsuits" will occur in those school districts that politicize their programs or refuse to include traditional voluntarism as part of the service requirement. The institute may represent Eagle Scout Aric Herndon, a ninth-grader in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Herndon's scouting activities don't count toward his service requirement. "Politicizing these programs inevitably leads to litigation as school officials and students battle over which organizations, in the words of the Bethlehem program, 'promote the welfare of the community,"' Bullock says.

Far from training a generation of students who prefer to work with their neighbors in "little platoons" to feed the hungry or house the homeless, service learning teaches the opposite lesson: Once an individual recognizes a problem, it is his duty to lobby the government to solve it. As one Maryland high-school student states in an MSSA video, "I feel I have a commitment to go lobby, even for myself. You know, I could go lobby for these people, because they can't all help themselves."