What’s happening at your child’s school on Tuesday?
By E M Barner | Sunday, September 6th, 2009 | Catch-AllPresident Obama’s scheduled speech to school children on Tuesday, September 8th, has been widely criticized for politicizing the classroom.
Of course, teacher’s have been using presidential speeches as teaching tools in the classroom since long before the Gettysburg Address, so what’s the big deal?
Apparently it is a big deal. Maybe it’s the concern that this speech will be unusually political. Maybe it’s the Department of Education released lesson plan that originally called on students to write letters on how they can “help” the President.
For whatever reason, more than 83 school districts nationwide have already decided not to air the President’s speech on Tuesday or to make it optional viewing. Loudoun County, Virginia choose to nix the speech altogether, citing their busy student schedule. What do you think? Should the speech be controversial? Should schools refuse to air it, require it, or leave the decisions up to teachers and principals?
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About the author
E M Barner, the blogger formerly known as DCH / De Civitate Hominis (“concerning the city of man”), writes from a Northern Virginia perspective. Barner has been active in Republican politics and policy since 1994 – as a grassroots volunteer, party leader, and professional.
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6 Responses to "What’s happening at your child’s school on Tuesday?"
Utter ridiculousness. He’s gonna tell students to study hard and be considerate to their teachers. Lots of presidents have been visiting classrooms. George W. was reading to some students when he heard about the 9/11 attacks. With our technological advances, President Obama can visit ALL of them.
BTW, there have been books collecting all those cute letters to the president before. What’s the big deal about asking the kids to write him?
classic partisan politics. if the tables were turned, the liberals would be screaming foul. anyway, Obama should talk to the kids. if he says something out-of-bounds it will only backfire on him.
The point is not the speech or what he was going to say to the kids. @JeffConn, don’t suppose that you know what he was going to say and don’t comment as if you do. The text that will be released tomorrow could have changed a dozen times since the story first broke. None of us knows what he is going to say in the address, either originally or now that it has been modified as a result of the controversy.
The salient point of the controversy is the original “Menu of Classroom Activities” which the DoE distributed. Write a letter to yourself about how you can help the president? Please. I don’t want my 6-year-old son contemplating how he can help “the president” – one single person – I’d rather him spend what civic-oriented time he has (between Star Wars and T-Ball) considering how he can help a charitable organization that he and his mother and I choose, or how he can respect, embrace, and defend the nation’s fundamental principles of liberty and freedom. Heady stuff for somebody who’s still learning how to print upper- and lower-case letters, I know.
This is also illustrative of a tactic of this administration, whch only crystallized for me when I heard David Axelrod say he was “bewildered” at the controversy. Interesting word. Seems to dismiss those of us who might think they would be uneasy with the speech, maybe even make us question our own thoughts. This administration attempts to stifle dissent before it ever passes the lips of the common man. You see it in the health care debate, ridiculing Sarah Palin’s “death panel” comment, even though the idea of rationing is very real. You saw it at the tea parties, with the media and the administration and our elected representatives disrespecting lawful, grassroots, honest protesters. You saw it at the town halls, when all the people who showed up with real concerns were portrayed as gun-toting crazies. This administration is trying to keep us common folks at home, keeping our opposition from ever being voiced, because we don’t think we’re a gun-toting crazy and we don’t want to be cast in that crew. Don’t open your mouth or you’ll be called either a birther or a racist or both.
I have to say that I’ve thought considerably about calling my son’s school – a PRIVATE school, at that – and asking if our baby angels were going to hear from the president on Tuesday. I actually did call on Friday, and was very releived when I went to voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message. I’m questioning my own thoughts and opinions, and I think that’s exactly what this administration wants. Question yourself, they can’t possibly mean that, surely he didn’t say what he just said, I’m the only one who’s having these thoughts, I better keep quiet, what would my friends think, I hope no one will call me a hate-monger. Paranoid much?
I don’t call anyone a hatemonger. I’m just saying this is much ado about nothing. In 2001, George W asked all the nation’s schoolkids to donate $1 to help starving children in Afghanistan. In 1991, George HW held a teleconference for school children about space science. If the technology was feasible then, either President Bush would have gone nationwide to all the nation’s classrooms. As for the lesson plan, here it is:
http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/lessons/prek-6.pdf
Pretty innocuous stuff. If anything, the plan encourages independent thinking.
“If you were the president, what would you tell students?”
“What would you like to tell the president?”
No indoctrination or socialism there. At least no more than asking all the nation’s kids to donate $1 to the children of another country.
Jeff, you’ve found the scrubbed lesson plan.
The original lesson plan, posted on September 1, includes the suggestion “Teachers can extend learning by having students write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president”. I repeat, no thank you.
I don’t care that Bush 41 or Bush 43 gave speeches to schoolkids; as I said above it’s not about the speech. None of us will ever know the original text of the speech.
I see nothing wrong with asking children to think about how they can help the President! I too am bewildered by this, and I am a Republican. I’ve read the speech and now listened to it too, and it is GOOD.
This is American politics as usual, sad to say. The only politicizing going on here has been completely at the hands of people who will look for any way to stir up controversy about their opponent’s party and/or leadership. And this type of behavior is not limited to one party – Democrats and Republicans alike do this all the time. If Bush had proposed the exact same lesson plans and/or speech, some Democrats would have found a way to take offense to it, while the Republicans lauded its virtues and accused Democrats of being “anti-American” for opposing it.
And no matter how the administration responds, it will be seen as an attempt to belittle those who disagree. It sounds awfully familiar – wait, didn’t the Bush administration do something similar with people who disagreed about the war in Iraq? As I recall, people were called unpatriotic if they didn’t support the President’s agenda. Outside the administration, people were berated as traitors, un-American and worse, simply for disagreeing with ANYTHING Bush said. Signs were posted, hate mail flooded the internet, all saying if you don’t support your commander-in-chief you should be shipped off to an oppressed country somewhere. I could go on and on.
So don’t try to act like this is anything new or unique. Grow up folks. Pick your battles where there is actually something to fight about.
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