President Obama will deliver a speech to students on Sept. 8 at noon (Eastern). He “will challenge students to work hard, set education goals, and take responsibility for their learning,” says the Education Department.
But some see it as indoctrinating kiddies to venerate the Great Leader.
Stephen Green and Dana Loesch are urging parents to keep their kids home from school that day.
The advice to teachers from the White House Teaching Ambassador Fellows is raising hackles. Before the speech, they’re urged to prep students by asking them:
Why is it important to listen to the president and other elected officials like the mayor, senators, members of Congress or the governor? Why is what they say important?
Too respectful of authority, write Green and Loesch.
After the speech, suggestions include discussing “main ideas from the speech, i.e. citizenship, personal responsibility, civic duty.” That doesn’t seem sinister. But there’s also:
• Students could discuss their responses to the following questions:
What do you think the President wants us to do?Does the speech make you want to do anything?
Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?
I think the president is going to ask kids to work hard in school and teachers will try to get them to pledge to work hard in school and most of them will work just as hard this year as they did last year. (The law of inertia is the supreme law of the universe.) If parents think their kids are being turned into Obama Youth, they can tell them at home not to trust politicians.
Update: Rick Hess thinks the president’s remarks probably will be innocuous, but he warns of hubris. The president isn’t superintendent-in-chief.
Students will be urged to take personal responsibility for their education, Arne Duncan tells Ed Week’s Michele McNeil.
None of you would object if W. or McCain wanted to speak to our schoolchildren, so it shouldn’t matter now. He is PRESIDENT of the United States. Of cousre he can make a speech to American kids in school. Duh! Presidents have done this before. People need to calm down and quit losing their minds over these things. Studying Civics and civil discourse is a part of education in a democratic society, and that means listening to the speeches leaders make, but still making your own decisions about them. What’s next? If it’s time to study a speech by Lincoln, all Democrat kids stay home, and when it is time to study an FDR speech, all Republican kids stay home? This divisive, fearful behavior is going too far when you think the President has no place in school. Have we forgotten that we are all Americans?
I don’t follow you, Richard. Are you saying I’m against courses in economics?
Lightly.
Geez. Pretending a metaphor is meant literally is so junior high.
If there were unfettered corporate access to the kids, there would be a corporate sponsored econ class.
Where, among other things, the subversive info that you can have a gross profit and a net loss would be explained.
That would make it difficult to get over on kids the profit-is-obscene meme.
That’s what unfettered corporate access would look like, along with Pepsi logos on the math books.
That, when pressed, all you could come up with is that textbooks were made by corporations is risible.