Tax Time?

A friend was recently asked the following question on a graduate school entrance exam: Would it be appropriate for a school to require parents to volunteer at their children's school?

My answer. First differentiate between private and public schools. The former should be free to create whatever innovative programs that might help the institutions mission and if parents don't like it they can send their children elsewhere. Regarding a public school, the oxymoronic notion of required volunteerism is truly horrifying insofar as the precedent it would set. Seeing as public schools are government institutions, the uncompensated work required would be a new type of tax, a time tax.

If this idea gained traction in the public schools, I suspect it would be only a matter of time before our Saturdays were spent assembling windmills and solar panels, for the good of society of course.

And there is another word for forced work without pay. I can't remember all the details but I thought our country had resolved that issue already.