October 18, 2007 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Presidential campaigns always seem to revive the debate about national service. Candidates, pundits, and average citizens argue about its legitimacy and whether it ought to be voluntary or compulsory. The latest round was stoked after a White House national security adviser announced that the military draft “has always been an option on the table,” suggesting that some policy makers were prepared to impose at least one form of mandatory service.
But what too often gets missed in popular debate about making national service compulsory — be it military or civilian — is that it may be invaluable for getting Americans more involved in their government and more concerned about influencing public policy.
If as citizens our only obligation is to pay taxes and user fees (for such things as passports and national-park entry), then we are reduced to little more than consumers of government services, to being government’s customers.
But citizens should see themselves as government’s owners — and owners know that no matter who is on staff, every once in a while you have to roll up your sleeves, get in there, and do some hard work because it really is your shop. And besides, you have to make sure that the management you picked is making good decisions.
Mandatory national service would change the relationship of people to their government and vice versa. Instead of acting as passive consumers who grumble about what they do or don’t get for their tax dollars, Americans would more likely demand accountability from their elected leaders.
After all, politicians probably would be deciding what military or community-service priorities were most urgent and therefore how most Americans would spend a year or two of their lives. And the act of service would get people more directly and personally involved in working on the problems facing the country and the world, so they would feel vested in what their government does or doesn’t do, and take it all the more seriously.
The need for Americans to feel that sense of ownership becomes more urgent every day. Conditions in the nation’s communities, towns, cities, and countryside are deteriorating. Things are quite literally falling apart in some places and breaking down in others.
Poor people and the middle class are dropping even further behind the wealthy. And the war in Iraq has been allowed to go on for years, costing thousands of lives and well more than a trillion dollars from the federal treasury, thereby denying government and the citizenry the money for pressing domestic and international needs.
Part of the reason so few people take action on these issues is their disconnection from government. Americans feel so disengaged that only slightly more than half of those eligible even bother to vote in presidential elections, and only about a third vote in “off year” Congressional elections.
Mandatory service would involve people directly with their government, some perhaps even as frontline helpers in its agencies. They would see the real-world implications of legislation, public policy, regulation, and administrative rules — of the decisions made by our elected leaders and other officials, as well as to see how government departments work.
People who fulfilled their service obligation by working with nonprofit organizations would learn much about constituencies poorly served by governments. Those direct experiences are very likely to increase and animate people’s involvement with government and their concern about its shortcomings.
Service would also strengthen civil society, especially people’s experience with and connections to one another. It would be very democratic, bringing people together across the lines that usually divide Americans by class, race, ethnicity, religion, geography, perhaps even age. That would be an important side benefit of any national-service plan.
The approaches to putting a mandatory national-service plan into effect are myriad. The mostpopular ideas usually focus on getting teenagers and young adults to spend one or two years in service. While serving, people would earn stipends or a salary and credit toward further education or other personal or community-development efforts.
But building a real ethos of service requires giving young people an early start on understanding what it means. That is why more cities and states need to make community service an integral and mandatory part of school curriculum from kindergarten through graduate-degree programs.
Part of the role of schooling is to build character, to teach civics, to turn out good citizens, the kinds of people we want for neighbors.
Community service helps do that. It’s as legitimate for schools to require service as it is for them to require reading, writing, and arithmetic. And they ought not to abandon that requirement even if a compulsory system is put in place to enlist people in the military or community service after they finish high school or college.
Well-run programs that integrate education and community service provide a continuing opportunity for young people to develop an increasingly nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the problems people and society experience. They also serve as real-world grounding for whatever academic and vocational subjects students pursue.
Mandatory-service programs for any age group would be a boon for nonprofit organizations. But supervising and supporting so many people who connect with a charity, either as a school requirement or through mandatory national service, will require a capacity and resources not now available in the nonprofit world. Helping nonprofit organizations to develop and continue to provide necessary support would need to be part of any new national-service effort.
In addition, government officials and nonprofit groups would need to ensure that any employees displaced by the tide of community-service workers end up in new roles that advance governments’ and organizations’ priorities. For instance, they could train and supervise the service workers or serve as staff members for the national-service program itself.
As the presidential primaries grow closer, nonprofit leaders should be working to persuade candidates of all ideologies to put forward their ideas for stimulating national service. Anyone proposing a compulsory-service plan will need to include ways to protect civil liberties, and accommodate conscientious objection and religiously grounded restrictions, while assuring that socioeconomic status does not allow privileged people to sidestep service.
The full impact of compulsory service, if it included the military, probably would be clearest the next time a president tried to lead the nation into an ill-advised war.
The fact that the vast majority of Americans would not be, and have not been, touched by the profound human cost of the current misadventure in Iraq made it much more acceptable, more tolerable to them. However, had all of America’s sons and daughters been equally imperiled by the decision to invade Iraq, had there been conscription — a military draft that did not allow privileged evasion — the country might not have gone to war so hurriedly or possibly at all. This is no longer the America of the Vietnam era.
In a less vivid but just as important way, even compulsory civilian national service would serve as a check on bad governmental decisions and action or inaction.
Imagine what might have happened if thousands of ordinary citizens had already been on the ground in New Orleans and the surrounding areas, in the government agencies and nonprofit organizations that were supposed to be mobilized, and if they had been in a position to immediately see, tell about, and act on every ineptitude in the hours and days right after Hurricane Katrina.
Besides learning more about helping one another, actually building stronger communities and serving society, mandatory national service — civilian and military — arguably would make Americans more-active citizens, more involved in what government does or does not do. And that’s a good thing. Let us keep the debate going.
Mark Rosenman works in Washington as a public-service professor at Union Institute & University, which has its headquarters in Cincinnati.
