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What do you think of this?September 4, 2009, 9:00 PM
Weekend Opinionator: Obama Goes Back to School
By TOBIN HARSHAW
To the list that includes Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and Steve Jobs’s NeXT computer — that is, ventures that were pretty much universally derided as a colossal failures before most anybody actually had a chance to see them — are we going to have to add Barack Obama’s 2009 education speech?
Politico’s Nia-Malika Henderson seems to think it’s a real possibility: “School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address Tuesday – forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation’s classrooms.”
Will the president’s address to America’s students be deemed a failure before he even gives it?
More background from The Times’s James C. McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon:
The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out of lending the president an ear.
Some parents said they were concerned because the speech had not been screened for political content. Nor, they said, had it been reviewed by the State Board of Education and local school boards, which, under state law, must approve the curriculum …
Previous presidents have visited public schools to speak directly to students, although few of those events have been broadcast live. Mr. Obama’s address at noon, Eastern time, at a high school in Virginia, will be streamed live on the White House Web site.
The first President George Bush, a Republican, made a similar nationally broadcast speech from a Washington high school in 1991, urging students to study hard, avoid drugs and to ignore peers “who think it’s not cool to be smart.” Democrats in Congress accused him of using taxpayer money — $27,000 to produce the broadcast — for “paid political advertising.”
Those on opinionland’s right wing have decided this is not a moment for understatement. Here’s a Washington Times editorial: “In a move suggestive of the Pyongyang public school system, the U.S. Department of Education recommended that before the speech students collectively brainstorm questions like, ‘Why does President Obama want to speak with us today? How will he inspire us?’ Classrooms are to be festooned with ‘notable quotes excerpted (and posted in large print on board) from President Obama’s speeches about education,’ presumably alongside benevolent-looking images of the dear leader.”
And one doubts that it will make much difference that White House has decided to make a copy of the speech available to educators on Monday and to drop its suggestion that students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.”
Indeed, Michelle Malkin sees ominous overtones from the radical past:
Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky – a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.
A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The “change” agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama – and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.
Ayers preached his education-as-“social justice” agenda to his “comrades” at the World Economic Forum in Caracas, Venezuela three years ago …
Just when we thought this was a one-noter, however, it turns out that not all conservatives are het up with outrage. CrunchyCon Rod Dreher, writing at BeliefNet, calls the reaction a “crazybomb on the Right,” while Hot Air’s Allapundit gives this response to an outraged PTA parent who asked why the president is “cutting out the parent” by speaking to kids during school hours:
Presumptive answer to her question: Because far fewer kids (and parents) are going to want to watch in the evening. People get grumpy when an Obama speech on something important preempts the primetime schedule; does she really believe they’re going to turn off “CSI” to watch The One drone on about education? I think kids can handle 20 minutes alone with him.
Among liberals, Steve Benen, the Political Animal, thinks Republicans are ignoring their own history, and not just that aforementioned appearance by the first President Bush:
In 1988, then-President Reagan spoke to students nationwide via C-SPAN telecast. Among other things, he talked about his positions on political issues of the day. Three years later, then-President Bush addressed school kids in a speech broadcast live to school classrooms nationwide. Among other things, he promoted his own administration’s education policies.
President Obama wants to deliver a message to students next week emphasizing hard work, encouraging young people to do their best in school. The temper tantrum the right is throwing in response only helps reinforce how far gone 21st-century conservatives really are.
The folks at The St. Petersburg Times’s PolitiFact, however, point out that vice is paying compliments to the virtue of both parties:
President George H.W. Bush gave an address to schools nationwide in 1991, from a junior high school in Washington, D.C. News reports from the time said the White House hoped that the address would be shown at schools nationwide …
You may have guessed this already, but news reports from the time indicate that Democrats criticized Bush for giving the speech.
“The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students,” said Rep. Richard Gephardt, then the Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives.”And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.’”
Patricia Schroeder, then a Democratic member of Congress from Colorado, said the speech showed “the arrogance of power,” and that the White House should not be “using precious dollars for campaigns” when “we are struggling for every silly dime we can get” for education.
For Salon’s Joan Walsh, the right is using the president’s attempt to play a “paternal role” as another excuse to paint him as “the other“:
Where to start to explain this hysteria? Since the height of Sarah Palin’s dishonest and divisive campaign last September, I’ve been alarmed by the unique way in which Obama’s opponents paint him as “the other.” For the life of me, I can’t think of another American politician — not even Hillary Clinton, although it’s close — who has spurred such visceral, irrational hatred. (Tell me if I’ve missed anyone in comments.) Sure, John Kerry was “French” and Michael Dukakis was Greek (and looked like a pinhead in that dumb helmet), but only Obama is a Marxist Communist who pals around with terrorists and wants to harm your children.
The hysteria Obama inspires in his far-right foes is primeval, primordial. From the Birthers’ obsession with the facts of his birth — which lets them obsess about his origins in miscegenation — to the paranoia that he’s coming for the children, there’s a deep strand of irrational paranoia that can’t be anything other than racial. These people don’t merely disagree with him, they distrust and dislike him viscerally. He’s not merely wrong, he’s scary; even terrifying.
As for what that “other” is, Jim Shaw at the Huffington Post doesn’t mince euphemisms: “Beyond all the ’state indoctrination’ and even Hitler Youth analogies being propagated by Obama’s school chat, I’m wondering how much there is (or is also) a racist meme at play. It’s something along the lines of: You can’t trust your children alone with this man … knowing how black men are. Wink, wink.”
The conservative blogger Tigerhawk, however, makes an effort to find common ground with the Walsh argument:
Of course it ought to be fine for the President of the United States to deliver an address to the nation’s school children. The content will be moderate, constrained as it is by the great risk that it will infuriate parents, who also happen to be voters.
Of course the lefty irritation at the reaction of the right is intellectually dishonest. Had George W. Bush cooked up this idea, the screams from the left would have melted down the motherboards in our computers.
The problem, obviously, is that students in public schools are a captive audience. This is the real reason why liberals and non-religious people object so forcefully to voluntary school prayer — they believe that asking children to assert their right to excuse themselves is an unreasonable burden on their little psyches, risking as it does social opprobrium. I happen to think that argument has it all wrong — children who learn to stand up for their own beliefs at the expense, perhaps, of social popularity reveal strength of character, which is at a great premium in this world — but it is at the center of all but the most legalistic arguments against school prayer.
Well, why don’t the same arguments apply to Obama’s speech? Why should the little Hopeless kids have to raise a ruckus to avoid listening to a speech from the president? Are not their little psyches precious too?
The big solution is to get the government out of the business of actually running schools. That would mean more freedom for everybody and in all likelihood better and most cost-effective schools. We would also avoid these nettlesome arguments over prayer and presidential speeches, because no student would be captive to anything other than the choice of his or her parents, which is the way it ought to be. Sadly, there is no way that the Democrats would go for that.
Alternatively, how about we agree that schools are “free speech” zones, and that kids are free (at times and places that do not interfere with substantive instruction) to speak and listen — or not — without interference, whether or not the speech in question is religious, political, or politically incorrect? What better way to teach children to “question authority” — an idea that was very popular on the left until roughly eight months ago — than to defend their right to do so in school? Looked at that way, the opposition to Obama’s speech is itself a lesson in civics that the authorities who run our schools would do well to learn themselves.
And when it comes to cooler heads on the whole business, Jim Lingdren at the Volokh Conspiracy is chillin’:
One of the things that President Obama does best is inspire children. Accordingly, whether his speech is appropriate or not, it is likely to do more good than bad. At least I hope so …
The Obama administration has backed off its earlier suggestion for students to write “Dear Leader” letters. The sad thing is that government bureaucrats had to be told how inappropriate their plans were before they wised up.
Whether the Republican pushback plays well with the public or not, it may have dissuaded Obama from making statements as aggressively statist or collectivist as he would have made without the pushback. Personally, I will be watching for Obama’s statements about his 2008 campaign goal to have every middle and high school student perform 50 hours of community service every year. I suspect that the unexpected Republican opposition will cause him to softpedal this goal in his speech.
Interesting, but intending to parse the speech for details on community service would mean, gulp, actually listening to it before passing judgment.
Link: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/weekend-opinionator-obama-goes-back-to-school/
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