If you’ve been online at all today you’ve no doubt read about Obama’s upcoming nationwide speech to schoolchildren on September 8. Maybe you’ve even read that Malkin and others are getting their panties in a wad over it, with some even calling to keep your kids home rather than subjecting them to the speech. My kid will be there, and I’m not bothered by that fact at all.
I don’t have a problem with a U.S. President telling my kid to study hard in school. Do I trust him, as SusanHW asked me on Twitter today when I’d said I didn’t care about the speech? Oh hell to the no.
But, see, I already know how little children work: they’ve been indoctrinated for years to idolize the office of the President and until they’re well into their teens it’s difficult for many to separate the office from the man. I also know that kids — and this time I include teens — are insanely curious about anything that Mommy or Daddy is against. Keep a kid home so they don’t listen to Obama then send him to school the next day when all of his little friends are hero-worshiping the guy, and what do you get? A future Democrat.
Oh, I’m fully aware that even if Obama keeps his speech specifically on-point about the importance of a good education, as Malkin points out “Obama zealot teachers like this one across the country will do all the extra-curricular bullying and haranguing for him.”
Living here in a rather conservative county in Kansas, I have the luxury of knowing there aren’t a ton of rabidly liberal, crap-spewing teachers like that one. I also know that, if one of my son’s teachers were to start proselytizing like that, I wouldn’t be the only parent shouting in the school office the next day. (But I might be the meanest.)
Frankly, I like to pick my battles carefully. Those of us in the GOP need to realize that bitching about every little thing the Dems do doesn’t make us sound informed or even draw attention to our primary issues; it just makes us sound bitchy.
Besides which, I know from experience that my boy is going to tune out any speech lasting longer than 30 seconds in favor of poking the little kid sitting next to him.
UPDATE: The White House has backed off of the wording in the teaching materials which was calling for students to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president”. Instead, the call is for students to write to themselves about their short- and long-term educational goals, with teachers collecting and holding the letters then giving them back to the children at a later date so they can see whether they’re keeping in track with the goals they set for themselves. (Source: Fox News).
