Some months before last April's Philadelphia summit on volunteerism, President Clinton called for hundreds of thousands of volunteers to teach children how to read—because the schools were not doing the job. What are our teachers, their unions, and the government doing with the world's largest expenditure on education—if nobody is getting around to teaching the students how to read?

One year later, the failure of the summit leaders to address the root causes of such a massive failure of the educational system is still conspicuous. Instead, President Clinton continues to call for mandatory "volunteer" service for all school students, so they will learn "the joy and duty" of service. On Good Morning America, while in Philadelphia, Mr. Clinton went beyond calling for just high school and middle school students to be inducted—he also maintained it would be good for fourth and eighth graders.

Advocates who want to force students into this service have not yet explained just how "public service"—which is used as a punishment for criminals—is morally uplifting for students.

President Clinton also did not explain what these 9-year-old children would be required to do, so we can only speculate: Give sponge baths to winos? Read to the elderly? Oops! Can't be that—these children can't read, remember?

It is easy to picture 1,000,000 guilt-ridden adults showing up as reading tutors at American schools some morning, only to be told that all of the children are down on skid row serving soup to addicts. But then, the government seems to place a higher priority on students learning the "joy and duty" of service than on learning how to read.

Many educators defend mandatory service by saying: "If we can require English and math, why shouldn't we require public service?" This is a good point if the purpose of education is moral indoctrination, compulsion, and punishment. Of course, if our educators thought that the purpose of education was to teach skills that help individuals to produce, achieve, and build their own lives, they might have a different focus—like teaching students to read and to think clearly. But that is probably an unimportant detail to those who think that when Chairman Mao forced Chinese students into the fields to pick rice for two years, he was establishing a model for American as well as Chinese education. Incidentally, the national anthem of communist China is "March of the Volunteers."

Politicians like to exact a price from citizens for alleged government generosity, so they say that the kids should be made to "give something back" (as though they have unchosen obligations to anyone who has helped them). What about the government "giving something back" to the students' parents who have paid a lifetime of taxes to a government education monopoly—which can't even teach their kids to read?

The purpose behind the Presidents' Summit was service for its own sake—whether or not it helps the recipients. What else could be the purpose of mandating service from fourth graders? Are they really expected to be able to help the "needy"? Have 9-year-olds in the past year succeeded where $5 trillion in government expense for the "War on Poverty" has failed? These 9-year-olds are just expected to learn to live for others—to surrender their lives and their values to the government at the earliest possible age. If they surrender the right to live for themselves, they will only serve the purpose of those who want to exercise power over every detail of their lives.

All of this is just the latest scam from the oldest type of con artist on the planet. This long line of priests, tribal chiefs, kings, dictators, socialists, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and seekers of political power are still telling us we should punish the producers, achievers, inventors, and creators—by forcing them to serve those who do not produce, achieve, invent, or create. Americans were liberated from these thugs when the Founding Fathers proclaimed the inalienable right of each individual to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If President Clinton and the educational establishment continue to focus on their goal of teaching "every young American" the "joy and duty of service"—that they have no moral right to pursue their own happiness but a duty to pursue everyone else's—our freedoms will recede into history. Then it will make no difference if anyone can read or not.

Mr. Ralston is a former director of development at the Ayn Rand Institute. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.