Opinion: Volunteerism Should Not Be Mandatory

In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg criticizes Sen. Barack Obama’s promise to “set a goal for all American middle- and high-school students to perform 50 hours of service a year and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year” if he’s elected president.

Mr. Goldberg argues that America already has a healthy culture of service and says that spending federal education dollars to meet new service goals would make public service something people did because they had to, not because they wanted to. Such a shift in public perception would ultimately do more harm than good, he writes.

(Free registration is required to view this article.)