In the last week or so, the American public has learned of Barak Obama’s hair-raising plans to initiate a compulsory youth service corps.  Obama proposes to tie federal funding for public schools to whether the school develops such a corps and requires students to contribute 50 service hours per year at the middle school and high school levels and 100 hours per year at the college level.  He also plans to tie tax credits to participation in the youth service corps, which he plans to fund on the scale of the US military.

After bloggers raised the alarm over these outrageous encroachments on parental leadership, private charity and limited government, the official Obama website softened its rhetoric from “required” and “compulsory” to “encourage”.  However, the financial strings for schools and tax credits remain, indicating that the Obama administration really does mean to strong-arm America into service on Obama’s terms and no other.

Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, goes further, indicating that this youth service corps would become a new “civilian security force” alongside the military.  Young men and women would be required to undergo three months of “basic training”, but it’s “not a draft”; it’s simply a way to beef up national security (?!?!) This is sounding uncomfortably like the Soviet Union’s Komsomol (read a contemporary description of Komsomol activities from the Cold War era in TIME magazine) or Hitler Youth.

There has never been a government-organized youth movement that has not been a tool to replace family values and parental oversight with loyalty to a State regime and its values. They have all been means to subvert traditional values and to divide families and to alienate generations. It is difficult to imagine that Obama’s youth security force would be any different.

So it’s time for Christian educators and families to tool up to face this grim possibility.

First, we must practice self-control, and refuse government hand-outs for education.  All early college programs, charter schools and public school off-campus options are government-funded – usually through the local public school system – and already come with all the restrictions on freedom of speech and religion that are so rigorously pressed in public schools.  Yet many homeschoolers have been duped into accepting these public funds and the strings which are attached.  Families who have become dependent on the government for funding for their homeschool programs will be as hard-pressed as will public schools to give up those funds when the Obama regime begins to tie them to participation in the Obama Youth.  We must be in a financial position to resist Obama’s “encouragement” to allow him to re-educate our children in emotionally-charged, cult-like boot camps.

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Learn how to find private funds for educational opportunity for high school and for college in Countdown to College: the Homeschoolers’ Guide to Winning Scholarships.

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Second, we must be ardent in creating our own public service opportunities and expectations for our children.  True charity is a gift from one heart to another – without any intervening government agency.  We don’t need the permission, validation or sanction of a government beaureacracy to organize relief or to design solutions to the problems we see in our own backyards – or in the wider world.  We need to train our children to see needs and to take initiative; we do not want to teach them to wait for a government official to tell them what to do and how to do it.

Training our children in public service already has enormous benefits in terms of building trust and community among diverse people. It is already a major criterion for private scholarships.  Now it may become a way for us to resist the Obama Youth, if it should come.  My students often log between 200 and 1,000 service hours per year, dwarfing the government projections by orders of magnitude.  Plus this service allows families to work together and to build respect for each other into the bargain. We will be able to argue that we already accomplish amazing things in private service, and we shouldn’t mess with a system that works so well.  Perhaps we will be able to stave off “required service” for our children.

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See how to design public service opportunities for your family and how to impact those hours on entrepreneurial opportunities, college scholarships and cottage industries in Countdown to College: the Homeschoolers’ Guide to Winning Scholarships

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One thing the election of Obama must mean to us is that it is no longer possible for Christians to withdraw from public life or to rest in comfort.  We must be first in faith, first in resolve and first in service to Christ and in imitation of His service to us.