{"id":27748,"date":"2014-09-11T00:01:15","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T04:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27748"},"modified":"2014-09-09T17:37:45","modified_gmt":"2014-09-09T21:37:45","slug":"qotd-the-real-lesson-taught-by-mandatory-volunteer-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/09\/11\/qotd-the-real-lesson-taught-by-mandatory-volunteer-work\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The real lesson taught by mandatory &#8220;volunteer&#8221; work"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>What about the rationalization that charitable extracurricular activities teach kids important lessons of moral engagement? There are reasons to be skeptical. A skilled professional I know had to turn down an important freelance assignment because of a recurring commitment to chauffeur her son to a resum\u00e9-building \u201csocial action\u201d assignment required by his high school. This involved driving the boy for 45 minutes to a community center, cooling her heels while he sorted used clothing for charity, and driving him back \u2014 forgoing income which, judiciously donated, could have fed, clothed, and inoculated an African village. The dubious \u201clessons\u201d of this forced labor as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are entitled to treat their mothers\u2019 time as worth nothing, that you can make the world a better place by destroying economic value, and that the moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary.<\/p>\n<p>Steven Pinker, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newrepublic.com\/article\/119321\/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests\" target=\"_blank\">&#8221; The Trouble With Harvard: The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it&#8221;, <em>The New Republic<\/em><\/a>, 2014-09-04.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What about the rationalization that charitable extracurricular activities teach kids important lessons of moral engagement? There are reasons to be skeptical. A skilled professional I know had to turn down an important freelance assignment because of a recurring commitment to chauffeur her son to a resum\u00e9-building \u201csocial action\u201d assignment required by his high school. This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,79,13],"tags":[744,351,504],"class_list":["post-27748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-education","category-usa","tag-charity","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7dy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27749,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27748\/revisions\/27749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}