The Right is all in a hubbub over President Obama’s address to public school students. The accusations being lobbed at the president are fairly astonishing: that he will brainwash the students, that it’s a plan to indoctrinate them to Socialism, that he is trying to enslave them, and my personal favorite, that he will incite the black students to rise up, riot, and attack and hurt the white students. All of this is going to be caused by an address by the president about the important of staying in school, working hard, and (at one point) serving your community and your nation. This is the speech in question, by the way. Very terrible, isn’t it? Inciteful and dangerously socialist.
Some people were offended by the idea of the president calling upon children to serve their community. After all, community service is a terribly offensive notion! Volunteerism and activism are to be discouraged. Public servants like police and firefighters, well, they’re really more like public menaces. And serving your country? Boy howdy, we can’t have that. That’s commie talk.
Our county’s public school system will not be showing the president’s speech. I think the children will learn a valuable lesson from this. They will learn that it’s not important to respect the office of the president or the person holding it, that partisan politics trump any sense of national unity, and that if you don’t like someone’s message, it’s ok to ignore it completely and force everyone else to do the same. Great job, guys! No matter how little I thought of President Bush, no matter how bad I believe he was at his job, I never would have balked at my child being addressed by him. I never would have encouraged my child to be disrespectful of the office of the presidency.
Here’s where my issue with all this lies. I believe children should be taught to respect the office of the president. I also believe that an elected president has every right to address students in a publicly funded school. If that’s not something you want your children “exposed” to, you should consider private/religious school or *gasp* homeschooling your student. I’ve seen the argument that because parents can control what their children watch at home, that they have a right to control what they watch at school. That might hold some water if they also had a right to control the curriculum, the food that was served, the schedule, etc. at a public school. After all, they can control all those things at home, so they have the final arbitrating power at school, right? The thing is, these parents aren’t talking about controlling what their kid watches. They’re talking about controlling what ALL the kids watch. They want to keep every child from being able to see it, not just theirs. If you want to control every aspect of your child’s day, just keep them home.
The elementary school into which my child is zoned will not be showing the president’s speech. My homeschooled child, however, will be watching it. We will pull the video up online and he will watch it, then he will respond to it in writing. If he were still enrolled in the public school, I would be keeping him home so he could watch it.
I believe the president has an important message for our children. I believe you have a right to disagree with that. I also believe that if you need to mind your own kid’s business, and keep your damn nose out of everyone else’s kids’ business.
