President As Teacher: An Education
Next week President Barack Obama will visit Wakefield High School in Arlington. He will deliver a speech that will be broadcast to students across America via C-SPAN and the White House Web site. In many schools activity will stop so youngsters can watch their president. Powhatan has opted not to join them; Henrico will make viewing available but not required.
Obama is edging toward omnipresence. Theologians can ponder the implications.
Nevertheless, Obama is a passionate spokesman for educational excellence. Regarding reform, his administration seems willing to challenge his party's tepid establishment. Although we would prefer more daring initiatives, at least the White House embraces innovation. Obama's rhetoric and presence cannot but help to instill in students a love of learning.
The Department of Education even has prepared a preK-6 "menu" suggesting classroom activities to accompany the presidential address. This seems a little much -- and something of an indictment of the nation's teachers. The menu recommends such inoffensive things as asking students to identify the president and to wonder why he is speaking to them. It also asks why it is important to listen to presidents and other elected officials. The study guide does not necessarily offend, but we would have credited teachers with the professionalism of being able to do this all by themselves.
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The Republicans are fearful. They’re fearful that a black president, democrats, and a less conservative agenda will take over their freedom. What they don’t understand is that freedom has been blackened by the takeover of big business to the detriment of the worker; freedom has been blackened by the lack of morality and non-care of the poor of our country and of the world; freedom has been blackened by the lack of concern of our planet; freedom has been blackened by the proliferation of guns, available even to our children through lack of parenting; freedom has been blackened by insensitivity to those born gay rather than heterosexual; freedom has been blackened by not letting women decide whether or not to let a few cells become a child, even though the cells belong to their own bodies. The injustice in our society today is due to the conservative control of our lives. It must be broken so we can make headway into becoming better people in a better world.
In order to do that, we must help the conservatives lose their fear. We must help them understand that we want freedom as much as they do. We don’t want to take away their own freedoms. We want to make this world a better place for ourselves and our children.
But we need their respect for our values and we need their respect for our country and its president. The school system should be ashamed at its lack of respect to our president, only to appease the fear-mongers. Education should be on a higher plane than that. Where is our sense of what’s right in the school system? Where is its backbone? I’m highly disappointed in our school system in Virginia. Our schools should be standing up for what is decent and right and just, not cow-towing to the fear-mongers.
It’s times like these that make me fearful of our own humanity.
The fear and hate machine has lost all sense of decency in its hunger to regain lost political power since 2006 and 2008 elections. I recall President Bush Sr giving his back-to-school talk in Y1991 and even his son filmed in a Florida school trying to read “The Pet Goat” to little kids. All presidents should be supported not only in funding our education system, but directly encouraging the youth to strive to better themselves; thus, improving our society.
President Obama has gone to visual means to encourage young unmarried fathers to embrace their responsibilities of fatherhood. He has shown, by example, achievements of hard work, hard study, high education, in self-improvement. Obama’s agenda? Top two seem to surely be education and quality affordable health care, both for all, as well a civilized society should embrace. Single highest $ allocation within the Recovery Act? Education.
What is the agenda of the fear and hate machine? Appears only one. Power; even at the expense of supporting our kids education efforts.
The book used on 9-11-01 is appropriate for 9-4-09; “The Pet Goat”. We seem to have a large herd of sheep and goats among us, so easily moved by others toward cliffs.
Thanks theobserver…it took only four posts before you dragged race into the discussion. No one mentioned race, as usual, but that’s always mentioned in the Obama worshippers rebuttals. This topic’s in the toilet already, so I’m out.
Why don’t you conservatives just admit that you don’t like the prez because he’s very bright (which makes conservatives nervous—he’s not the bumbling george bush); because he’s trying to solve a real problem, health care—as opposed to lying to the American people to start a war; because he’s dark-skinned and a Democrat. That way, you can stop embarrassing yourselves with all this lame criticisms. He’s too visible and omniprescent: He’s the president! He’s supposed to be in the public a lot. He’s trying to pass a huge reform bill. What a bunch of nonsense—and the usual wishy-washy reaction from the T-D.
“Obama’s rhetoric and presence cannot but help to instill in students a love of learning.“ What a crock. Whoever wrote this is living in a dream world. All I can agree with in this article is the statement about Obama “edging toward omnipresence.“ And even that is disputable because I would have placed him at omnipresence months ago. Has he spent one single full day in the Oval Office? I can’t recall any other presidents being on television every single day.
VaGentleman, excellent post! Of course, you’re going to get hammered by the non-spelling, non-punctuating Obamateers on here, but you have at least one supporter.
I guess I’m missing something here: the president of the United States wants to address school students at the beginning of the year to encourage them to study hard and take responsibility for themselves and people are patting themselves on the back for preventing him from doing so? Whatever.
Nicely done. This picks up one of the persistent threads of this President and his administration: a desire to influence or “guide” discussion at the local level. The President is completely over-reaching on a host of issues to such an extent that he is unable to even take a true vacation. The American people are growing tired of his “All-About-Me-All-The-Time” style, especially when one may go to a variety of sources and see that he is unable to maintain a consistent line of thought on his major policies.
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