September 8th

Kenneth Hynek • 3rd Sep 2009 • Politics, American Politics, Society, Education, Society, Freespeechery
Abraham Lincoln, America, Barack Obama, Canada, George Washington, health care, Hillary Clinton, HRC, Liberal Party of Canada, Link Byfield, socialism, Ted Byfield, Theodore Roosevelt, United States, White House

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of political speeches to begin with. And that goes double for speeches given in schools — human fallibility is such that what begins as a reasonable speech can quickly become a propagandic exercise, especially if there are a sufficient number of teachers willing to place agenda ahead of objectivity.

It’s also no secret that I’m no fan of Barack Obama. Given that fact, it should come as no surprise that I’m not exactly a fan of this idea he’s had, to deliver a speech to all the schoolchildren in America.

Especially when I look at the lesson plan that has been issued to accompany the speech. there’s something Orwellian about stuff like this:

Before the Speech:

Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama and motivate students by asking the following questions:

Who is the President of the United States?

What do you think it takes to be President?

To whom do you think the President is going to be speaking?

Why do you think he wants to speak to you?

What do you think he will say to you?

Teachers can ask students to imagine being the President delivering a speech to all of the students in the United States. What would you tell students? What can students do to help in our schools? Teachers can chart ideas about what they would say.

Why is it important that we listen to
the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

Okay, granted, one could have a good deal of fun with questions like that, and parents could likewise suggest a few legitimate, though perhaps contrarian, responses that their kids could give to some of them.

And yet, there’s something vaguely creepy about the whole thing. This is, after all, just another political speech; why all the advance preparation? Why the suggestion that kids read up on Obama beforehand? Why ask a series of questions that any court of law would dismiss as “leading?”

And, frankly, why should the kids care about what Obama is going to say until he’s said it? How would the American Left have responded to the Bush administration issuing a similar set of guidelines prior to a Presidential address? How many teachers, in such a case, would have openly refused to follow those guidelines?

During the Speech:

As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
What is the President trying to tell me?
What is the President asking me to do?
What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?

Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?

HillBuzz has a (ahem) fabulous take on the whole thing:

We didn’t think anything could be worse than the whole “Report Your Neighbors Program” the White House pushed, where citizens were encouraged to report their friends, family, and neighbors if any of them were overheard disagreeing with liberal Democrats and their push for socialized medicine.

But, forcing school children to listen to Dr. Utopia…in a speech we know he will use to try to mold these children into political tools…thinking the kids will run home and tell their parents they need to stop resisting socialism and start supporting Dr. Utopia. Or else they are RAAAACISTS! probably.

…

We hope this blows up in their collective liberal face.

If Republicans were smart, they’d organize a National Keep Your Child Home From School Day on September 8th — for at least the part of the day that Dr. Utopia will be “speaking directly to the children”.

We think it would be more educational for parents to take their children to a museum that morning…or keep them home and read a book with them…or maybe show them a video about George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln (or, if you’re us, Hillary Clinton).

You know what I find bizarre? Crap like this really doesn’t seem to happen in Canada, that I can see or recall. We’ve got a host of other “Orwell problems” (like the HRCs), and we’ve got our flirtations with socialism as well (as in our health care system)…but I’ve never once seen a Canadian PM go on television to specifically address the nation’s schoolchildren and ask them to help him shape the course of the nation. And if one ever did, he almost certainly wouldn’t provide an accompanying curriculum therewith! Even my high school physics teacher –a Liberal Party of Canada booster who berated me as a racist for expressing agreement with a political comment made by Ted Byfield* — would probably be (rightly) alarmed by such a thing.

Has the world now truly gone mad, that Canada seems the more politically sensible?

* * *

* his specific reasoning in damning me as a racist was as follows: I agreed with Byfield about one point, so I must naturally agree with everything any of the Byfield family have ever said or done. And since Link Byfield once shot a dirty look at a guy who showed up to a conference wearing concentration camp “pyjamas,” he must be a racist…and so must I also be.