Mandator civil service or a draft are horrible. It would delay us in graduating from the university

They would delay us 2 years in getting through the university. In most countries in the European Union you only need 3 years to get a BA and 5 to get a MA. It works out that most people studying have their BA at 21 (hell even 2O sometimes in the UK) and their MA at 23. If you make people do 2 years civil service not only does their brain get out of scholarly mode and into physical labor mode, they lose 2 more years. The educational system in the USA already makes it so we need 4 years to have a BA and 6 to have an MA, we are already 22 and 24 when we get these degrees and with civil service we would be 24 and 26 A FULL THREE YEARS BEHIND OUR PEERS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION. Very few countries in the EU still have mandatory drafts or civil service and kids who want to get around it in the few places that still have it can simply move to another EU member state.

Why should someone like me have to do civil service when we already worked part time and went to university full time? what benefit to society would that have?

If you are concerned that the army of today is made up of poor people perhaps you should ask why it is harder for kids in poor neighborhoods to access universities.

In addition student loans exist so people can go to the university WITHOUT doing military service. (i know there is debt afterwords that is why i call for a Scotish style system in which universities are free for all).

I like the idea of everyone either serving in the military or doing community service, like the Swiss.

My motto:

"This is YOUR country, motherfucker, serve it well."

that isn't serving my country well?

No, we should not put skin in the game, some of us have brains, others either dont have them or dont like exercising them so they dont go to the university. I serve my country well by studying at its public universites and exercising my mind and then contributing to society. I do it even more as my whole reason for going to the university was to BE A TEACHER! What would you have had me done, pick up garbage or create campgrounds out in the woods? I dont really do that whole manual labor bit except for helping my friends burn off brush or chop firewood. If you want to sweat for your country though hard physical labor be my guest, i prefer to sweat from the stress of running a classroom full of students IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

Maybe you have some prejudices that make you so defensive.

Studying in public universities is a wonderful opportunity, but not a service to your country- (it SHOULD be a right, but alas, here in this country it is not)


I have a difficult time believing you are a teacher with the rather chauvinistic and glib attitude you have towards intelligence and the ability to serve, particularly your disdain for physical labor.

I think a year digging ditches would serve you well.

But that's just me.

Ditch digger, soldier, social worker, poet.

sorry but that work is beneath me. i didn't study so damn hard to get an MA at 24 to dig ditches. The kids who mocked me for having good grades in high school can do that kind of work.

They should earn a middle class living off of it. I see no problem with a ditch digger and a teacher both being solidly middle class there is just no way in hell i am going to waste my mind, my degree, and all the money my father paid for my education from his mechanics salary to dig ditches.

I am indeed a teacher, i teach English in a jr. and at a law school where it is really a study of current events from anglophone countries this year, my degree is in being a history teacher which i did on a one year replacement at a high school with an international section last year (taught history in english).
Even my friends tell me not to waste my degree doing labor (my friends who are gardeners or who do masonry work like making stone walls in gardens etc.) I do a few days work like that here and there for extra money but it generally pays worse than teaching which is shit because we need walls.


like i said the people that mocked me for "having too much brains" or being an "honor roll loser" can do physical labor and have a sore body after work but i am on the far left so i think that we all agree to have health care, own our own home, have free universities, and have nice vacations -so i support going to 5 weeks minimum like they have here in France.

that is what happens when you are on a chain gang. no way am i going to do a job that difficult when i have a MA. I spent all my weekends parking cars to pay for expenses at schools and worked my ass off doing homework to get my degree. I had basically THREE OR FOUR WEEKENDS A YEAR that i was not valet parking cars for 5 years while in undergraduate and graduate studies and it was not to be digging ditches for a year.

picking grapes for a month, fine, chopping firewood for a friend all weekend long because his back is out and he and his wife and kids need heat, fine. spending a couple of weeks helping my friend clean up after a huge flood, INCLUDING DIGGING A DITCH TO GET TRAPPED FLOODWATER BACK INTO THE RIVER, sure, but no fucking way would i do that kind of shit for a job for a year. so far i have been able to get jobs using my mind, they may not always pay well, but i have food, a roof, and pot and vacation money so i have no complaints.


and as you have read, i think that ditch diggers and teachers like myself ALL deserve to have a nice middle class lifestyle as i dont think using ones body should lead to less salary than using ones mind.

Try working in a plant that made charcoal brickettes-that's how I made my way through my first year of college. Three showers and there was still coal dust on me. Valet parking gets you so grubby.

that talk down to you because you park cars, and you work all your friday and saturday nights too. you made charcoal, i parked luxury cars in front of night clubs, both of those jobs sucked in different ways. I never said that i thought less of people who dig ditches, it is just beneath me because i have other skills, i can and do work at high level jobs than that. as for salary i think that people in charcoal factories, valets, ditch diggers, office workers, teachers, firefighters, police and the like should all be solidly middle class.

yet more proof that all work has unpleasant parts, so on top of that i dont want my body to ache and studied for years to increase the probability that i can find non manual labor work. also more proof that all jobs need to be paid well too as they all entail stress.

How about working on your own punctuation and capitalization?

by keeping the nation's funds in motion.

Everybody can justify why they shouldn't put their ass on the line while they are so willing to put another person in harm's way.

between scientists doing research and development and bankers?

and dont forget that there are honest bankers who really do just want to help people get home loans, most bankers are not wall street sharks.

though not so much when teachers are claiming that certain jobs are "beneath" them.

You could shame bankers with that sense of entitlement.

Do you realize how well educated many of our service people are? Also, does your education make you more worthy as a person and the lives of those with less education as you somehow worth less? Is it fair to keep demanding that the same people go back time and time again and put their lives on the line while the likes of you stays calm, cool, collected and your clothes are all sweet smelling since you don't need to expend your sweat?

as teachers, just that i dont do manual labor except sporadically. I have friends who became soliders to go to college, one got an other than honorable discharge for refusing the anthrax vaccine, an other is finishing officer training and then going back to grad school and another killed himself after his second tour in Iraq. I NEVER SAID SOMEONE WITH LESS EDUCATION IS WORTH LESS I SAID WE SHOULD BOTH BE MIDDLE CLASS. I just think that my working away my weekends for 5 of my 6 years spent getting my MA should compensate to me using my body less for my job. Like i said those that made fun of me for having good grades can dig ditches for a job (not mandatated in some kind of civil service). I ALSO SAID I PREFER TO SWEAT FROM THE STRESS OF RUNNING A CLASSROOM! i stink after work too, just not from physical activity.
When i want to sweat from physical activity i go mountain bike riding, about 4 days a week during the school year and about every day during holidays. I also spend a day or two a month chopping firewood with an axe for a good friend of mine just to hear he and his wife say how happy they are to have a couple of weeks of wood ready to go (they do feed me a meal usually to but i bring home made cookies too). I also help this person take care of the estate they live on(wealthy english family gives them very cheap rent so long as they upkeep the estate) by doing bonfires after gathering up the brush that needs to be burned. When friends move i help carry their out of the old place and into the new place. During floods here last year i went walking around to help people, mostly to help people struggling to carry their kids so i waded around in the shit polluted water with kids i didnt know and have never seen again on my back while their sibling was on mom or dads back.

i have nothing against using my body to help people but dont like the idea of being forced to do it, i dont like the idea that digging ditches for a year would be good for me becaue it wouldn't.

there would be far more opposition to wars when it's possible that YOUR SKIN could be placed as a sacrifice on the altar of greed.

I think it's high time we had a draft again with ZERO exceptions. Your dads a congressman? Tough shit. Your dads a zillionaire? Tough shit.

Too many have either forgotten the horrors of Nam or weren't around for it. Our attitude towards war since has been despicable. If it takes a draft to start a war free nation, I'm all for it~

war was going to be paid for and fought by whom, since most of the regulars are fairly worn out with the two forever wars. Might just be that in order to keep receiving our SS, us seniors will be inducted into military. Since we can't run very fast anymore, we'll be easy targets - poof, the problem with funding SS will be over, plus the educated young-ens' won't have to fight. Problem solved!

And, again, bringing the ubiquity of warfare closer to the homes and families of the typically unaffected is more likely to engender the acceptance of warfare as a normality of life.

In particular, a draft will foster the perception, through conflation, that such problems cannot be solved and one can only do what one is told. This is the attitude of the citizens of nations that have a draft.

People don't think in straight lines but in parallel clusters of related, mutually supporting ideologies. If there is a draft, the average person is likely to assume that it's necessary.

The Vietnam War went on and on and on, why do you think that was? It was seen as NORMAL.

I don't care how the law is or would be written. That is surely what would happen.

as do all jobs from the federal government smoke a joint and get out of all civil service. I am poor but could avoid this for my daughter as we have 2 nationalities.

It's an independent movie that came out in 2007. It didn't get much attention when it came out, but it should have. It's about a hypothetical scenario where the draft comes back to the U.S. in the middle of the war on terror (oblique references are made to 9/11 and a fictionalized terror attack on Los Angeles having occurred the year before). The movie is about three friends who are drafted and how they have to respond to the call to service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Zero

Why stay and fight for a country that denigrates my teaching profession, mocks intellectuals, and has the audacity to criminalize me for the flowers i like to grow to the point that they want to piss in a cup for a job, put me in a cage and take my kids away if they find my flowers, and has a PR campaign to make people like me seem like the antichrist?

Oops, i already left and live in a country where my taxes actually pay for us all to have a nice social welfare system, nice schools, 300 euro a year universities, single payer national health insurance, and in general helps to make life bearable for the poor.

I just teach in their public schools now instead of teaching in American public schools. No denigration of the profession from the government (they dont support standardized tests as crieria to fire), no drug tests, no ads on tv saying that potheads are ruining France....

To help others escape.

I know Sweden does, I believe that Germany and Denmark do, as well.

Finland, Denmark, Austria, Greece, and Estonia in the European Union (Germany's is set to/has expire(d) in 2011 and Norway, Belorus, and Switzerland in Europe

All the rest have no obligatory army or civil service.

because I don't think the state has the right to compel service from its citizens, but...

there's no such thing as a "scholarly brain mode" or a "physical labor brain mode" and many young people's brains are still maturing. They would do better in school if they took a few years off. Too many kids go to college just because it's what their parents expect and don't have a clear idea of what they want to do with their degree. The result is hordes of unemployed English Lit, Philosophy, History, French, etc. majors- far more than the market can support. I did my first MA when I was 22-24 and I'm doing my second now at 33-34 and it blows my mind how much easier it is to understand course readings and theory even though I'm taking an objectively much harder subject.

Plus in many/most European countries students start to specialize at 14 or 15 going down to only two or three subjects instead of taking a broad based curriculum, which is more common in the US. That's why they can finish university in three years (they only take courses on 2 subjects) and get PhDs at 24 or 25. But the approach in the US is more cross-disciplinary, arguing that students need to be basically conversant in a range of subjects before they specialize. And arguably, being cross-disciplinary drives innovation which is why the US still has most of the top ranking universities in the world.

Anyway, to sum up, I think the draft/national service is a gross abuse of state power, but that taking more time to finish college and studying a broader range of subjects results in a better quality education. Hurrying people through school and into the workforce isn't really a desirable goal.

literature, philosophy, history or french for lack of knowing what they want to do. I have known that i wanted to teach history since i was 17.

(and classics) and it was because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Well, I knew I wanted to be Indiana Jones and write a novel but that didn't work out...

It's a cliche but it is based in a lot of truth, based on other lit majors I know. Most of them have a god-awful, half-finished novel or poetry collection kicking around somewhere. Meanwhile they teach comp seventy or eighty hours a week (with grading) for $22,000 a year and no benefits. Or they take miserable entry-level jobs in publishing or advertising that somehow stay "entry-level" for ten years. The other cliche is true too- I know a lot of pre-med students who got their asses kicked by organic chemistry, changed majors to English (because it's "easy") just so they could finish their degree on time and then graduated without any kind of clear career trajectory. Some of them land on their feet. Some of them still delivery pizza, or drive cabs, or work at Target.

Not saying all 18 year old are directionless (or have unrealistic directions). Good for you that you knew what you wanted at 17 and it was achievable. That's not true about a lot of people... and certainly by 20 or 21 after a few years of working, many young people have a better take on what they want out of life and how college can get them there. And with a little more experience and maturity, they find that college is less of a struggle than high school might have been. Their focus is better, their work ethic is stronger and it's easier to understand more complex concepts.

while we were still in high school and we worked right on through the university as well. I didnt really struggle with school at all except my first year of high school. Those of us who know what we want should not be held back because others are not ready.

I started working at 15 and worked all through college. But "slumming it" in construction, retail or fast food part-time or for a few summers isn't the same at all as working full-time where you have to accept that working the night shift at Target and the day shift at the supermarket for $8 an hour is your *life*.

I didn't struggle in school. I always got straight As doing barely any homework. But that's largely because I only took classes in things I was good at and avoided math and science. I needed something to push me into challenging myself and I didn't really get it until I spent a few years in the "real world" (i.e. being unemployed and losing my apartment, having no savings and sick family I couldn't help).

Anyway, nobody's talking about holding anyone back. As I said, I agree that national service is a bad idea. If you know what you want to do at 17 and it's likely to pay back your student loans and give you a decent standard of living then I say go for it. But I was arguing with the assumption in your OP that taking a few years off from school will disadvantage students and that hasn't been my experience at all. You don't always "get rusty" because you haven't been in school for a while and a little more maturity can actually make getting your degree (and a job afterwards) a lot easier.

Graduate at 24-25, with ZERO college debt, and eligibility for a VA loan when you want to buy a home..

Sounds like a win-win..

and a side benefit?

the ones fit enough to do military service would serve as a tempering-agent to the military and might help balance out the wacko-kill-'em- all types that are gravitating to the military these days. When there was a draft, all sorts of young men went.. artists, readers, intellectuals, musicians, etc.

It's true that the rich ones had an out and many chose not to serve, but a "new draft" could be crafted so that they too had to serve