COLUMN ONE : Ask Not What the Critics Say : Serve your country, earn an education or a down payment. It seemed like a simple idea. But all that’s being volunteered is scorn.

At recess time at St. Edmond’s parochial school in south Philadelphia, the youngsters crowd around to watch blue-uniformed volunteers from the Philadelphia Youth Service Corps swarm over the 75-year-old structure, painting the trim and patching the concrete.

“The building looks wonderful,” says Sister Nancy Marie Firn, the principal. “But the best thing about this is that it gives the children a chance to see people working together to help someone else.”

In a rudimentary way, the 2-year-old Youth Service Corps is a testing ground for a nationwide scheme that would be much more ambitious--and has turned out to be far more controversial--than similar programs here and in other big cities.

Some Democrats in Congress are proposing to channel the energies and skills of young people into federal social programs by enlisting them in a national “citizen corps” of perhaps 500,000 volunteers.

The proposal’s sponsors, Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and Rep. Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, are promoting it as a new approach to government activism in an age of big deficits and tight budgets. Not incidentally, they are also seeking to pump new life into their political party.

Though some of the plan’s backers see a concept as unassailable as motherhood, it has touched off fierce opposition and raised the fundamental question of how much Americans now can realistically expect from their government--and vice versa.

The breadth of opposition to the proposal and the range of epithets used against it may represent some sort of unofficial record.

Among liberals, Rep. William D. Ford (D-Mich.) called the approach “reminiscent of Stalinist industrialization in the 1930s.” Conservative critics recalled that economist Milton Friedman once likened a version of the national service concept to the Hitler Youth.

Pentagon officials fear that a citizen corps would complicate recruiting for the armed forces. And the War Resisters League branded the idea as “coercive” and “a guise for the return of a draft.”

“It’s the organized left and the organized right who are against it,” Nunn said. “The left basically wants everything to be in addition to, not instead of” current government benefits. “The right doesn’t want government involved in a big way in people’s lives.”

The citizen corps was first proposed early this year under the aegis of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of party moderates, as a way to advance its goal of moving the Democrats toward the middle of the road.

“This is not a guaranteed benefit, it’s a guaranteed opportunity,” Nunn said.

Like the GI Bill, the program would offer tangible benefits--tuition payments and housing assistance--in return for service. It would also phase out most other forms of federal aid to college students.

As the program was originally contemplated, volunteers for civilian service would receive a $10,000 voucher in return for a year of work in education, health care, conservation or public safety. They could use the voucher toward college tuition or a down payment on a home.

Under another option, a recruit could choose military service and get $12,000 a year. The cost of the program has been estimated at $5 billion a year even after most current federal education aid programs were phased out.

Advocates say that what distinguishes the citizen corps and gives it political potency is that it would reach middle-class youth, much as the Peace Corps has, while other youth programs have been aimed mainly at lower-income groups.

Democratic National Chairman Ron Brown called the Nunn-McCurdy measure “the first major new social program that has been advanced in Congress in well over 15 years. We are talking about a government program that will make this nation better by reestablishing a special relationship and responsibility between our government and its people.”

Probably the most serious and intense objections to the proposal have been stirred by the idea of replacing most federal aid to education with the option of earning part of tuition costs as a citizen-volunteer.

“The Nunn-McCurdy bill is based on the false premise that access to education beyond high school should be a privilege for the few who have ‘earned’ it, as reward for their public service,” wrote Ford, a senior member of the House Education and Labor Committee. “The reality is that we need to ‘give’ as much education as we can to as many students as are willing to take it.”

Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, said: “They are attempting to take money away from the school aid program, and we don’t want to interfere with that group of students.”

McCurdy says that the opposition the proposal is encountering is symptomatic of many politicians’ current determination to avoid responsibility for the cost of benefit programs and other government services.

“The (Ronald) Reagan Administration for eight years gave us no pain and easy answers,” he said. “The Democrats are afraid to touch entitlement programs.”

Backers of the bill modified the original proposal by making it possible for volunteers to serve in the corps while going to school. It would also allow current federal aid programs to continue for young people with disabilities or heavy financial obligations.

“The only young person who would fare more poorly under national service than under existing programs,” Nunn said during a Senate hearing, “would be an able-bodied high school graduate with no disabilities or other compelling personal circumstances who simply did not want to perform any service whatsoever.”

In answer to critics of the proposed phase-out of current federal programs, Nunn-McCurdy backers say that earnings from the national service in most cases would exceed amounts available through federal grants, and that national service would offer financial support to the estimated 50% of American youth who now do not attend college.

Advocates of national service say they are encouraged by the success of local volunteer programs such as the Philadelphia Youth Service Corps.

“The lesson is that service programs can work, particularly that we can manage programs with low-income kids,” said Charles C. Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist who is one of the driving forces behind the Nunn-McCurdy proposal.

If the Youth Service Corps here is any indication, one key to success is a tough, no-nonsense approach.

“This is a hard program and a demanding one,” instructor Ann Kreidle told a group of new recruits, all high school dropouts, some fresh from scrapes with the law. “You’ve got to get here every day, and you’ve got to get here on time. If you are ready to do that, fine. If not, we don’t want you.”

Supervisor Daryl Hinton said that only about half of each incoming group makes it through training, and that staff members continue to weed out “knuckleheads.”

One such troublemaker was 18-year-old Chris Dozier, who was suspended for writing on the wall at his job site but was given the chance to go through training again. Asked why he had returned, Dozier, who first joined the corps after he was arrested for his involvement in a gang fight, said: “So I can better my hopes for the future. They gave me a second chance to get my life together.”

Anthony Fairbanks, executive director of the corps, said he considers it “an embryonic version of a national service corps,” but he doubts that Congress will approve the Nunn-McCurdy proposal, with its phase-out of existing education programs, any time soon. “There is no way in hell the education lobby is going to let that happen,” Fairbanks said.

For all their accomplishments, the Philadelphia corps and similar service programs in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland have difficulty attracting middle-class youngsters.

One reason is the low compensation they offer, usually minimum wage or less. Another, said Northwestern’s Moskos, “is that they lack the glamour of an organization like the Peace Corps.”

For youngsters from low-income families, on the other hand, the urban corps programs--which include courses and other help--offer the prospect of getting the equivalence of high school diplomas, which many lack.

Gail Kong, director of the New York City Volunteer Corps, the biggest such program in the country, acknowledged that only “a small number” of her 450 volunteers are middle class, and that 75% of them are high school dropouts.

The low-income volunteers generally get high marks for their conscientiousness and commitment.

At Chinatown Day Care Center in Manhattan, about 10 City Volunteer Corps members who serve as teachers’ aides were busy last Halloween showing young witches and goblins how to bob for apples. “They are a big help,” teacher Victoria Mangubat said of her aides. “The children respect them because they know how to discipline them.”

But sometimes their limited experience and education are handicaps.

Hugh Simmons, a college-educated former Peace Corps volunteer who is team supervisor for the volunteer contingent at the Chinatown center, said that the volunteers could accomplish more and have a bigger impact on the children “if their skill levels and abilities were higher.”

Low-income volunteers probably would be more effective and their experience would be more gratifying if they were teamed with better-educated volunteers, Moskos said. That would be a goal of the Nunn-McCurdy proposal.

“Working with middle-class kids usually helps lower-income kids raise their performance level,” Moskos said.

Middle-class volunteers would also benefit from a diverse experience, said the Philadelphia corps’ Fairbanks. “Both middle-class and lower-class kids have much to

learn from each other,” he said.

Advocates of national service initially welcomed President Bush’s early emphasis on volunteerism--what he calls his “thousand points of light”--because it would help focus attention on the idea of service.

But some have come to view Bush’s “YES” proposal, for Youth Entering Service, as a hindrance. The White House has yet to spell out details of his proposal, and some Republicans seem reluctant to act on any kind of service measure until they know what the President has in mind.

From what is known, Bush’s proposal would seek only about $25 million in federal funds to establish a foundation to promote community service.

A similar proposal by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) for support of service programs run through schools, is included in a Senate bill that was approved last summer by the Kennedy-chaired Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. The bill would also provide $100 million to start and expand local youth service corps programs.

And still another section of the Senate bill, inspired by the Nunn-McCurdy proposal, would provide an additional $100 million for state-administered, five-year demonstrations of the national service corps approach. Volunteers would be eligible to receive vouchers good for buying homes or paying tuition, though other types of educational aid would continue.

The House Education and Labor Committee is expected to produce its own national service bill this month. McCurdy says he hopes for the best.

“With the pilot program, we can allow states to demonstrate that it can actually work,” he said. “Then, I think, there will be a a move to supporting it. I’m not discouraged. When you go outside (Washington area), there is a lot of support for it.”