The kerfuffle over Obama's Tuesday address to schoolchildren is hardly worth mentioning except for the extreme reactions on both sides. First, you have the Democrats accusing the Republicans of being hypocritical, noting that Reagan and G.H.W. Bush also addressed schoolchildren during their Presidencies, and saying that the GOP is trying to bar the President from encouraging kids to stay in school and stay away from drugs. Then you have some strong reactions on the right, with parents, worried about Obama trying to use access to their kids to brainwash them with his political agenda.
On the whole, the argument tilts in favor of conservatives on this point. The Democrats and their special interest groups (e.g., NEA), in comparing Obama's speech to those of Reagan and Bush, are being disingenuous; as Fox News pointed out, the Dems at the time not only attacked the speeches on partisan grounds, explicitly demagoguing the issue by suggesting that President Bush had funded the speech using school lunch program money, but subsequently launched a Congressional investigation. Now with a multi-trillion dollar deficit, the Democrats and their cronies hypocritically fail to apply the same type criticisms to Obama. As CBS' Mark Knoller mentioned, since the inauguration Obama has given more speeches and sets of remarks than days he's served in office; schoolchildren today (versus in the earlier Presidencies) have multiple ways to get information instantaneously; I might wryly suggest that if the White House really wanted teens to pay attention to yet another Obama speech, they might have packaged it like "Things That Sarah Palin Doesn't Want You to Know": it would have been the longest, most boring viral video ever.
Of course, comparing a progressive activist agenda like Obama's to a politically conservative approach like Reagan or Bush's is apples and oranges. Conservatives generally lionize the self-made man's path to personal success through education, hard work and willpower, prefer local solutions to education and promote the idea of competition to public schools. The idea that a progressive President speaks with any comparable authority on individual responsibility and the work ethic, when, in fact, he goes around cutting government checks to people whom don't pay any income taxes, wants to raise progressive tax rates only on economically successful people and businesses (whom already pick up a disproportionate amount of the federal tax burden), and picked a Supreme Court Justice whom unsuccessfully attempted to bury a reverse discrimination firefighter suit, is the ultimate expression of chutzpah.
In fact, the White House itself is largely responsible for the adverse reaction. For instance, it decided to bar the press from Obama's meeting with the championship NCAA women's basketball team and produced its own video, there was that August news conference where an 11-year-old daughter (of a female lawyer whom was an active financial supporter of the Obama campaign) "coincidentally" noted that protesters were "saying mean things" about his (Trojan horse) health "reform" and then served up a softball question to Obama, there was the earlier summer press conference confrontation where CBS' Chip Reid and veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas confronted the White House Press Secretary Robert Gibb of trying to manipulate the press by using plants and preselected questions, and more recently there was the legally dubious solicitation of emails critical of Obama's health care "reform" agenda, a not-so-subtle attempt to intimidate political opposition. The general impression is of a White House that is attempting to control the media in an unprecedented way, blurring the line between policy advocacy and propaganda.
The suggested lesson plans for the address from the Department of Education had several disturbing elements, e.g., encouraging children to read Obama's autobiographies, asking students to explain how they can help Obama, having them summarize key ideas from the speech, etc. I have not read all the lesson plans, but what I have seen or heard is incompetent, unduly reflecting on Obama personally and his own opinions, versus the underlying salient concepts and issues involving education and our economy. We see very little emphasis on higher-order cognitive skills (say, for instance, if we work from Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, which I discussed in one of my journal articles); for example, why do some of our urban public schools continue to fail? What role, if any, should the federal government play in education? Should lower-income parents have a meaningful choice in what schools their children are able to attend? How do Obama's policies differ from his predecessors, and what are some of the key limitations of his approach? Summarize, compare and contrast alternative approaches to education policy.
But, in fact, the proof is in the pudding. The following quote comes from the prepared text released September 7. Note how Obama is not subtle in interweaving progressive political judgments, principles and policy goals into his speech:
You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment.You'll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free.You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
This exchange came from the actual (delivered) question/answer period. (Notice the softball question, and Obama willing to use the occasion to promote his latest Congressional address on health care.)
STUDENT: Hi, my name is Sean. And my question is, currently 36 countries have universal health coverage, including Iraq and Afghanistan, which have it paid for by the United States. Why can't the United States have universal health coverage?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that's the question I've been asking Congress, because I think we need it. I think we can do it. And I'm going to be making a speech tomorrow night talking about my plan to make sure that everybody has access to affordable health care.
