{"id":2660,"date":"2009-09-08T14:01:46","date_gmt":"2009-09-08T22:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2660"},"modified":"2009-09-08T15:06:37","modified_gmt":"2009-09-08T23:06:37","slug":"obamas-speech-to-the-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/obamas-speech-to-the-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s Speech to The Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

The overheated right-wing pundits were on to something after all.\u00a0\u00a0 Obama\u2019s speech <\/a>to the \u201cnation\u2019s students\u201d was pompous, ridiculously long, chock-full of ed-school bromides, and wholly beyond a president\u2019s proper role.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why should students study, according to Obama?\u00a0 Because they will develop \u201ccritical thinking skills\u201d from \u201chistory and social studies\u201d that will allow them \u201cto fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free.\u201d<\/p>\n

How about studying because you will gain actual knowledge–not just \u201ccritical thinking skills\u201d–that will lift you out of ignorance?\u00a0 How about for the love of learning and beauty?\u00a0 How about because facts matter?\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the \u201ccritical thinking skills\u201d that Obama thinks will \u201cfight poverty and homelessness\u201d led to an awareness that out-of-wedlock child-bearing is the greatest cause of long-term poverty in this country, I might reconsider my contempt for\u00a0the critical thinking cult\u00a0and for the ed-school mantra <\/a>that education is about learning how to learn, rather than about hard-won knowledge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I doubt that that\u2019s what Obama had in mind.\u00a0 I also doubt that he expects that \u201ccritical thinking skills\u201d will reveal that homelessness is overwhelmingly a function of substance abuse and mental illness, or that it is often a lifestyle choice<\/a> by people who want to live outside the rules of normal society.<\/p>\n

When Obama wants students to use their \u201ccritical thinking skills\u201d to make the nation \u201cmore fair and more free,\u201d he probably didn\u2019t mean getting rid of racial preferences, either.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Obama\u2019s prerogative, of course, to summon up the usual litany of liberal social causes as the be-all and end-all of existence and education\u2014science and math are desirable for \u201ccuring diseases like cancer and AIDS, and developing new energy technologies and protecting our environment,\u201d he said.\u00a0 No one would object to curing cancer or developing clean energy; these are noble pursuits.\u00a0 And he gives at least passing acknowledgement that business exists and that working in the for-profit sector can actually have social benefit beyond providing an occasion for taxation:\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, I have to admit that the knee-jerk opposition to the speech, which had struck me until now as another depressing sign of how paranoid and overheated the opposition to Obama had become, was more right than wrong.\u00a0 No, Obama is not trying to enlist troops for the socialist takeover of the economy; his speech is no more radical than the thousands of commencement speeches that froth out from college greens every year.\u00a0 And obviously the call for hard work and personal responsibility is welcome; had the speech been directed explicitly at black students, I wonder if the conservatives would have blown their tops.
\n\u00a0
\nPre-speech, I had decided that it was more insane to object to the President addressing school children, than for the President to address them in the first place.\u00a0 (Though I had fully in mind Gene Healy\u2019s brilliant analysis <\/a>of the late arrival of children in the presidential public vocabulary, and the legitimate critique that presidents really have more pressing obligations within the constitutional framework than worrying about children).\u00a0 Why shouldn\u2019t the President be a momentary and non-partisan presence in the classroom, making visible a part of our government, I thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But reading the speech, I have changed my mind.\u00a0 The impression it gives is of an enormous ego and sense of boundless power and portfolio.\u00a0 Even if Obama had not announced: \u201cI\u2019m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn,\u201d the speech still makes you ask: Who, exactly, are you to be saying these things to children?\u00a0\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it the role of teachers and parents to encourage hard work and a love of learning?\u00a0 Is the president also the Great Roofer and Parent and School Purchasing Department in the Sky?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not ready to buy into the entire right-wing critique of Obama as a dangerous threat to liberty or as the very embodiment of “The Left.”\u00a0 But this speech does suggest a disturbing lack of perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The overheated right-wing pundits were on to something after all.\u00a0\u00a0 Obama\u2019s speech to the \u201cnation\u2019s students\u201d was pompous, ridiculously long, chock-full of ed-school bromides, and wholly beyond a president\u2019s proper role.\u00a0 Why should students study, according to Obama?\u00a0 Because they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,332,333],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2660"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2660"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2666,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2660\/revisions\/2666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}