>>632I'm replying out of order, bear with me.
>Isn't socialism all about wealth redistribution?>You can take from the more wealthy parents to give to the broke ones.We're not taking anything for granted when designing a system. Each part of the system has to work as intended even if other parts change or fail.
If you indirectly pay for community service work via tax-credits, that would created a dependency on a fair wealth distribution in order to operate as intended. If something bad happens and wealth distribution goes out of whack again, then we get knock-on damage because all of a sudden poor children work community service for free while rich children get payed. And then people just nope out of your community service program.
That's fragile design. If you simply directly pay a wage for community service work, this failure mode can't happen and you got a more robust design.
>March thru early June, schooltime will be spent outside of the classroom doing various activities such as basic landscaping, cleanup, machine repair, etc.>It will be Monday thru Thursday 8am to 3pm. Fridays off.Ok the point of doing this is for children to learn how to do these tasks, to get the skills. What this can't become is an excuse for exploiting child-labor, or increasing the labor-supply. It has to be impossible to use this in a way to use children to increase competition in a labor market. Assuming that socialism can revert back to capitalism, it has to be designed in such a way that no capitalist would be able to extract surplus from children.
The principles apply as before, we have to assume nothing is for granted and then build in mechanisms that prevent this from being turned into child-labor even if other parts of society go to shit.
The first thing is children who perform this have to be payed a regular wage. And each activity has to be limited to the time-span it takes for learning a skill. And we're giving children the power to declare the work as exploitative and quit without consequences.
If you think i'm being unreasonable, consider that the type of nasty people who are currently ruining the world, would probably remain that way in a socialist system. They would not give up and let us just have a nice world, they will relentlessly claw at the system. So we have to harden every bit of the system.
Think about institutional design as if you are building a space-station in the Aliens scifi-universe and you have to design it in such a way that it will not go down even if it gets breached by the monster-creatures.