Obama’s Education Speech Sparks Fear Among Backward Masses
As soon as the White House announced President Barack Obama’s plans to broadcast a speech on September 8, 2009 to the nation’s students, the conservatives started screaming in terror.
According to the White House, the president simply wants to emphasize “the need to work hard and stay in school.”
The conservatives see it though as a secret White House plot to “indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas,” and several school districts vow to avoid the speech. The same goes for some gullible conservative parents.
This is so incredible, so hard to believe and so ludicrous that it almost seems like a screenplay for a really bad comedy, but unfortunately it is real.
In any normal country (including ours at one time) a speech by the sitting president to our school children would be viewed as a very nice gesture and a very positive development all around. Not any more, it seems.
The indoctrination carried out by conservative groups, including the religious right has seemed to work very well indeed.
A blogger accused Obama of “using students as junior lobbyists” and “disgraceful abuses of power.” Wow! “Zealous teacher’s unions have enlisted captive schoolchildren as letter-writers in their campaigns for higher education spending,” she said. “Out-of-control activists have enlisted their secondary-school charges in pro-illegal immigration protests, gay marriage ceremonies, environmental propaganda stunts, and anti-war events.” She also pushed for parents to get involved, writing, “Parents have every right to worry about their children being used as Political Guinea Pigs for Change.”
Where does she get this drivel, we wonder…
Another one writes: “The Obama administration is trying to push its president-worship onto 50 million captive schoolchildren.” Christian conservative leader Gary Bauer released a statement claiming that: “The Obama Administration is using its power in unprecedented ways, this time injecting itself into the nation’s classrooms. Tuesday may be a good day to sit in on your child’s classes.” Prominent Florida Republican Jim Greer accused Obama of “using our children as tools to spread liberal propaganda.”
Will wonders never cease? How do these people figure all of that out, without even seeing the text of the president’s speech? The White House promised the text of the speech by Monday, so everybody can make an educated judgment.
“Educated” seems to be a key word in this whole debate. We see it basically as an education-related speech, delivered by an educated man, who wants our children to be well educated as well. Are the uneducated really afraid that their children will surpass their limited intellectual abilities? We fervently hope so!
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Updated Monday, September 7, 2009:
Here is the text of President Obama’s speech as prepared for delivery, from the White House website. Are we missing something, since we do not see any signs of “indoctrination of children with socialist ideas”? Do you?
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Heaven forbid should the Government install a policy to ensure that children are educated and finish school and get the best shot they can at a life and career afterwards in a world where knowledge is power.
Sadly, this is another case of “Only in America…”
A sad reflection of what we have been turned iinto…
Can we add the Republican Party to the list of things the W permanently wrecked? There are only so many clever tricks one can script for a cast of hill billies and bigots. This latest stuff doesn’t even have so much as a comprehensible ideological thread. It is the theatre of the grotesque.
The normally suppressed conspiracy theorist in me thinks that this whole speech plan was a way to marginalize the right wing. Anything they can do to get more Obamaphobes with Hitler signs on the streets is a good thing for the administration. Since Obama and the democrats have shown a remarkable inability to control their own message, they have resorted to trying to control the message of their opposition.
On another note, the speech will probably be as meaningless as most of his other speeches. However, the suggested homework assignments that they sent out, (and you left out of your discussion) were pretty pathetic. Hence, many of them have been retracted.
Have the kids write a letter to themselves about what they think Obama should say for his next speech? What inspired you about the speech? These are loaded questions that basically ask the same question: why should you worship Barack Obama?
Is it really that hard for professional educators to come up with unbiased questions that actually encourage kids to think rather than reaffirm their own political beliefs?
You might be reading a bit too much into this speech, or maybe it will be meaningless. I certainly would not expect it to be an attempt to “indoctrinate … children with socialist ideas.” There is no doubt that we have fallen behind in education, as compared to a great many countries. Lets hope that this will at least be a start towards improving it to a degree.
I am having a hard time seeing how a speech by Barack Obama is going to do anything to improve education – even to a degree. If speeches could really solve problems, we would no longer have problems. We have had to endure so many speeches by this man over the past few months.
Burro, whether it will improve anything, remains to be seen, but why the hysteria from the right?
It seems that your dislike of Barack Obama is well established now. Of course you have a perfect right to like, or dislike him, or anybody else you might wish. I wonder, though why this kind of a sentiment is so wide spread among certain segments of the U.S. population… Is it because he is half black, or simply because he is smarter than your next door neighbor?
There seems to be a virulent desire by some to see him fail, no matter what. The effort to sabotage the health care reform efforts appears to be not only based on the push by special interests, but maybe even more so to create what one of the Republican “sages” has termed as “Obama’s Waterloo”.
Hey I love it. The more Obama does the lower his popularity gets. I think he should do a daily school address… we could use some stimulus to install LCD screens in every classroom then hook them up directly to the Oval Office for direct communications. Think of the jobs it would create and the popularity it would kill!
I don’t know how you go from 65% popularity to 45% in such a short time but maybe he got a shovel for a gift?
Could it be the right wing propaganda and enough gullible people, who believe it?
The economic disaster started under Reagan, was very, very much helped at the end of Clinton’s term and tweaked some more under Bush.
Now, Obama gets the blame for all of it.
Don’t you love having a well-informed population? And isn’t objectivity great?!
I don’t think the largest peacetime economic expansion under Reagan is to blame. Had Bush done a speech like this I’m sure Democrats would be in support of it!
And Obama took office with 65% approval. People didn’t know we were in troubled economic times?
Harrison, we had relatively strong and viable regulations in place, put in place after the Great Depression.
Reagan started the deregulation, Clinton continued it and Bush helped some more in that regard.
The results are rather obvious. Don’t you think?
As far as I know, nobody would even think of calling a Bush speech about education (about which he knew ever so little) “child indoctrination”.
We are a society used to instant gratification. Obama’s popularity probably dropped because enough people were dumb enough to expect him to fix the economy, which has been dismantled over a period of some 30 years in his first 100 days in office, LOL!
Bingo. I told you so. Reactionary neo-cons are allergic to leadership.
They are afraid everyone is like them.
I have always considered myself to be more conservative, than liberal, esp since having kids. However, ever since Obama has been elected the GOP, hasn’t looked so grand at all. Matter of fact I only see them as greedy,selfish, paranoid, and looking just plain dumb. I think they should at least wait until the speech is given, before they start making accusations. At least it takes he spot light off of health care for a while.
In my case, whatever conservative sympathies I might have had went out the door along with Bush’s presidency.
I don’t have a problem with the speech..It is a good gesture…My problem is this..Telling children to stay in school in a underfunded, drug-riddled, often times violent public school system just places the burden on shoulders too small…children..
Personally I think it will do more harm than good to his Presidency..
Imagine sitting in an overcrowded classroom, after going through metal detectors, guards, gangs, drugs..sitting with teachers worried about keeping there jobs… after spending billions I mean billions to stimulate the economy, that shows no real signs of recovery…Having parents or a friend with parents that are unemployed with little or no prospect of finding work in the near future..
Is this really the right time for this?
All conspiracy theories aside..President Obama has shown poor judgment..
maybe children don’t stay in school for other reasons, like the ones I mentioned above..
Maybe our leadership needs a a reality check..
It makes one wonder what is the alternative in the situation that you have described? Staying at home, wandering the streets, not having a future, without the benefits of even a basic education?
Granted, the speech might, or might not be meaningless, but do you think it could actually be harmful?
I think this uproar is absolutely stupid! Many Presidents have spoken on this subject before and this President should be able as well. My goodness, are we all too afraid to speak up and say that this is stupid to the press or anyone else?
Perhaps this ridiculous issue becomes more clear when divided into two parts. On one side, we are immersed in the hyper-drama of the ideologues, and on the other we face the rather chilling reality of not one, but several generations of extremely strangely educated young Americans. Naturally, the ideologues have little interest in the possibilities present in the reality of the moment. The actual — and immediate — challenge is not an ideological one, it is an educational one.
As such, we should probably be more interested in the utility and possible benefit of President Obama’s (remember the election?) speech rather than road weary talking points.
For comments on these troubling developments here in Albuquerque (the subject of very current information on our local educational achievement statistics…), I’ll plug my MeanMesa blog: “The Surrender of Critical Thinking.”
http://meanmesa.blogspot.com/2009/08/surrender-of-critical-thought.html
Sorry. It’s not ideology. There are bus loads of professionally numbed teenagers wandering around, wondering “what happened?”
Chad, thanks for the comment and for a very interesting piece in your blog.
All one really has to do is to observe the knowledge and school performance of some foreign students, who despite sometimes having to learn English from scratch usually outperform our “born in the USA” brethren very quickly.
A similar transformation usually also occurs in the case of American students, who had studied abroad for a year, or two. All of a sudden, they become the star pupils at their U.S. schools.
It obviously isn’t genetic then, but it must be high time to do something constructive about our educational system.
Yeah and we all know Republicans run the Dept. of Education.
Didn’t they run it for much too long?
DoE and public schools are loaded with Dems and Unions.
Sure, let’s blame the Dems and the unions for the sorry state of our education. How about blaming them as well for the hysterical reaction of the dim members of the right to the Obama speech?
The problem with the reaction to the speech has nothing to do with anyone on the right being “uneducated” as you put it. It has everything to do with partisanship on both sides of the aisle.
Dickster, maybe I generalized a bit much in that regard. Of course partisanship, instead of mutual cooperation for the good of the country is a big part of it.
At the same time, having witnessed some opinions, accusations and campaigns by the right, it isn’t hard to see that at least in some cases there is something seriously missing there…
What you fail to want to understand is there are many Americans who just plain don’t agree with Obama’s views on a myriad of topics. Now, if they don’t agree with him on so many issues why would they want him speaking to their children explaining his beliefs? Why is this such a difficult concept for you to understand?
Harrison, I do understand that there are many Americans who don’t agree with Obama on many things. I don’t agree with everything either.
What is so very strange is the viciousness of some of these disagreements and the frequent myths that spark many of them.
Where were these people when their “patriotic” opinions were needed during the Bush 43 presidency? At a time when true dissent was badly needed and largely lacking?
Your comment, which I think is correct and very much to the point, only shows that we, as a country have a long way to go.
We do not have a long way to go we have unfortunately gone too far. 25, 30, or more years ago something like this probably wouldn’t have been objectionable were it technologically possible. There are many parents who see certain agendas being pushed in schools (gay marriage or intelligent design for example) and don’t like it. They view the president as just another extension of that. You get people like Van Jones who was hired by Obama comparing a former president to a crack addict and signing a petition saying the US government was behind 9-11 and what else are people to think?
Trying to once again link George Bush to something is a futile effort.
And I’m not casting these parents as being “patriotic” only distrustful of the agenda of a man who wants to address their children who are young enough to still believe in Santa Claus.
Harrison, how would you define that we have gone too far? I can understand that some parents might not want their children to be “exposed” to issues that you mention. Quite possibly that is the reason behind the relatively recent explosion in the number of children undergoing home schooling. That’s almost all fine and dandy, providing that the parents know enough and are qualified to teach. It is also hoped that such children’s education goes beyond a single book…
It also seems that too many people “view the president as just another extension of that”.
Van Jones of course was largely correct in his opinions. In any case, he did resign, probably in order not to provide any more fodder to the Republicans.
I think that most of these parents would benefit from actually reading the text of the president’s speech, which is now posted on the WH site.
This reaction to the speech — made, uh, credible by all of Harrison’s validating examples — is based on a new presumption of mechanicality, a predictable development of growing social codependency, and, it’s not limited to this unusual new demographic of, well, “concerned parents.”
The premise? “Naive, innocent” children will be permanently and helplessly soiled by even the most deflected encounter with ANY ideas about abortion, homosexuality, socialism, poverty, health care, the kitchen sink, etc. which cannot be either reconciled with Genesis or Revelations or any of the unexamined, hypnotic “talking points” so carefully groomed by, yes, Rove, Rush or Dick C. and other fear mongers during the recent autocracy. These “great Americans” saw how wonderfully effective this approach was for Moses and St. John the Divine, and, naturally, similar ambitions became their wet dream.
What nature of parenting produces uninformed children who can be destroyed by hearing any idea? Was this the goal?
Chad, this is probably too hard to explain both to us and to them…sad…
“Van Jones of course was largely correct in his opinions.”
Hardly. The man worked the system to benefit himself, held views which are not what I would call acceptable for a government employee, and the country is better off for having such a vile man out of his job and he is doing what he does best… playing the victim.
It is not the speech, it is not the text of the speech, it is the fact that school children in many places will watch it whether their parents want them to or not. In some schools the speech will be given out on DVD for the teacher to decide, in others parents can opt-out but this is not the case in all places.
And children are not “destroyed” by hearing an idea… it is not an idea it is the philosophy behind an idea that parents find objectionable.
And by “gone too far” I mean as a society we are very polarized and people like Van Jones work as hard as they can to polarize the nation further.
“A vile man”? For expressing his opinions, even those with which millions of other Americans agreed?
How do you call someone then who starts two elective wars and in fact kills at least several hundred thousand people?
And what may I ask do you see as “philosophy behind an idea that parents find objectionable”?
And wasn’t it the religious right and Bush, along with the neocons who have really and seriously polarized our society?
Millions of Americans probably believe Elvis is alive but do I want them being appointed to influential positions in the government? And Van, when he got caught with the goods, backed away from it and denied he even believed in that. And calling a president a crackhead is vile. And if someone has such a low opinion of government why is he working for them?
You can bring up Bush all you want but the fact is Democrats, including Obama, had spoken out in support of Afghanistan and where were all those Democratic objections to Iraq when they didn’t read the intel they were given and why didn’t they all vote no? Hypocrisy I thought you wouldn’t have bought.
And the philosphy is that government can fix your life.
Harrison, all I can say is that you get two points for persistence.
I doubt if you managed to convince anybody, or turn anyone around to your point of view, but you certainly are persistent.
The prospects of revealing a convincing hypocrisy with President Obama has all the trappings of the chicken teasing the fox whether the subject is his upcoming educational speech, his philosophy or what ever else. Revealed hypocrisy, at this point, is both automatically suspect and as irrelevant as simply more “water under the bridge” through a land still saturated by a recent great flood. We are all still too numb to feel much just now (See? No mention of the W!)
What appears before us at this juncture is the total dissolution of the remnants of the Republican Party, and, yes, future history is already jotting down notes. The past is slipping by as a not too silent shade, the wonderful mystery is how the story will work out from here.
From MeanMesa: “In Memoriam: The Republicans” (Future History Series…)
http://meanmesa.blogspot.com/2009/01/in-memoriam-republicans.html
Read it and weep. What cold comfort there may be left emerges from the fact that no one ever actually did anything to them.