Obama and School?

[Eric]

What is this all about? I turn the TV off for about a week then I hear about the Department of Education handing out lesson plans, prodding kids to ask what they can do to help the president (like accepting all of their bullcrap), and now Obama is going to give a speech to all schoolchildren? I hope my former elementary and middle school isn't going along with this. What a joke! Can Obama tell me what role he has in education or acting as a father figure to every faceless American child? I don't get it. Maybe he thinks it's his job to intentionally provide his status as a role model to "inspire" kids across the country. It sounds like a personal attack, but yes, I think this guy is an egomaniac.

[Dossenator]

I agree with you. One of the questions on the lesson plan was something like: how has Obama inspired you? Hasn't inpired me at all....but what is a young, impressionable mind going to say when asked that question. Luckily, the White House a few days ago reworded several questions...including the: How can you help the president question.

Bentonville Schools, where I went to school, is not showing the speach today.

[donovan]

I do not know the content of the speech. I basically do not have a problem with the President of the United States addressing students and tell them to study...encourage them to stay in school...to give hope, etc.

Now if the content is other than that...pretty sure that is not appropriate. George Bush was reading to kids in school when 9/11 happened...I was ok with that....not sure we can have it both ways.

[Derek]

ehhh...I think there's a difference between visiting kids and speaking to the nation over a televised speech.

And yes, the questions were BS. One of the tasks the teacher was supposed to do was have the kids write a letter to themselves stating "what they could do to help the President."

I said..."Fine..."....my letter is below.


Dear Derek,
Please help the President find his real birth certificate, not that phony crap he's showing everybody.

Sincerely,
Derek

[Spence]

I do not know the content of the speech. I basically do not have a problem with the President of the United States addressing students and tell them to study...encourage them to stay in school...to give hope, etc.

Now if the content is other than that...pretty sure that is not appropriate. George Bush was reading to kids in school when 9/11 happened...I was ok with that....not sure we can have it both ways.

I have no problem with the President giving a speech to the children either. Several presidents have done it one way or another. The man is our elected president and politics aside we need to deal with it. We don't have to agree with him to acknowledge his position as president. I had heard his staff had put together a national lesson plan for the teachers to take forward from the speech. Obviously it didn't happen even if it was true to start with - and I don't know if that was the case. I saw nothing wrong with his speech.

As a rule I think that civics is not given enough air time in school anyway. If the president speaks, even on something we may disagree with, it provides a teaching moment for parents. That isn't bad in my view.

[WoVeU]

I do not know the content of the speech. I basically do not have a problem with the President of the United States addressing students and tell them to study...encourage them to stay in school...to give hope, etc.

Now if the content is other than that...pretty sure that is not appropriate. George Bush was reading to kids in school when 9/11 happened...I was ok with that....not sure we can have it both ways.

Bush was just rying to prove he could...just starting small...not wanting to have one of those Quayle moments.

[WoVeU]

Well Spence and Donovan sound like my wife, and I guess my sister too.

I just don't trust it. I think it is the starter. And the last I checked we ain't doing well enough to lose school time!

Now, if he really just wanted to talk to the kids I got a real good idea. Do it at 6:30 to 8:30 where I can sit there along side my children. Help a brother out, what is the problem with that. The only reason I see him doing it during the school day is to avoid my presence. But he is smart enough to do it like everything else the super-libs have done....nice and slow...methodical and unwavering! Make the first 1 to 3 passive and peachy, sounding all good. And it is K-12. They won the battles and brainwashing they have over the last 30 years largely through Universities, I think they are just cranking it up for the check mate!

Whatever...I can't wait till they come to visit me one day!

[Dossenator]

I have read the speech and I found nothing I objected too. My complaint was the questions formulated by the White House and distributed by the Dept of Ed. Here is a link (http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/academic/bts.html). You can click on the pdf files of the questions. The White House came out 2 days ago and changed the wording of a couple a questions (so the link provided does have the revised questions).

The original questions were: "how has Obama inspired you" and "how can you help the president?"

The questions are what bothered me. Now that they have changed them I feel more comfortable about it. I agree Spence he is the president and if we don't like that (and I absolutely don't) then we must get out and do something about it in 3 years.

[Eric]

I don't have an issue with the content of the speech either. I wasn't expecting him to lay out some socialist propaganda or anything like some on the right were believing. I knew beforehand pretty much that it would be a dull, cliched speech telling kids to work hard and stay in school. You know, stuff they haven't heard before.

Like WoVeU said earlier, school is too easy right now. I didn't graduate high school that long ago and I remember you could B.S. 75% of your homework and still get at worst a B+ (and that's taking advanced classes). I just have an issue with the position of the presidency meddling in school. And the schools decide whether or not every kid gets to watch it. I don't know...It just seems....Orwellian to have him in every schoolroom. Like I said, I think it feeds his ego

This guy must be the smartest guy on the planet. He wants control of our health, cars, schoolchildren, diet, and finance. Plus, this just furthers the stereotype to kids who know pretty much nothing about government that if they want to get something done, it has to be at the national level. I'm a staunch federalist and I just think it subverts the concept of federalism. That's my main objection.

[Eric]

This is mainly my argument (from the Cato Institute):

Is the president's speech part of a sinister plan to create a socialist Obama Youth movement? Hardly. The transcript, released yesterday, reveals a pretty standard homily to educational excellence, and there's no evidence it was ever supposed to be anything else. Even so, there's something grotesquely collectivist about the idea of the president addressing a captive audience of 50 million schoolchildren, hectoring them to turn off the X-Box and hit the books.

After all, the president has no constitutional power over education and no proper role in it. Our Constitution's framers thought schooling was too important to be left to a federal government that would be far removed from local communities, and whose principal responsibility was to deal with large national concerns, like defense, that the states and localities couldn't handle.

The framers were wiser than they knew: The lesson plans Obama Department of Education officials came up with after several meetings with the White House make it clear that federal education bureaucrats should be kept as far away from children as possible.

When they're old enough, in history class, kids ought to read and listen to presidential speeches like Ike's farewell address, LBJ's Great Society speech, Carter's malaise speech, and George W. Bush's second inaugural. And then they should be encouraged to dissect those speeches: What's the argument here? Is it convincing? We ought to ask kids to think critically about presidential rhetoric, instead of prodding them to burble appreciatively about his compassionate plans for everybody.

[Derek]

"Never trust a liar, even when he is telling you the truth"

[WoVeU]

"Never trust a liar, even when he is telling you the truth"

Haaaaah! Ain't that the truth!

(I have been around some habitual liars, that made me extremely uncomfortable when I heard a truth coming out of their mouth! I was looking for stuff to come falling out of the sky!)

[WoVeU]

Good Answer Eric...bofe of 'em! Yours and the one you artistic-licensed the Hell-Out-Of!