Brett Curtis, an engineer from Texas, told the New York Times that the idea of the speech “seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” and would therefore keep his three children home from school that day since he doesn’t “want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.” Jim Greer, the Republican Party chairman in Florida, said he “was appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology,” while Kansas City talk show host Chris Stigall, with thoughts of sugar plums and executive pedophilia floating in his head, stated that he “wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone.”
Never mind the sheer ignorance of all these people, especially the clear fact that none of them knows the definition of fascism or socialism, or could explain the difference between a democracy and a republic, for that matter. Nevermind the fear-mongering and hateful resentment of a recently beaten-up political party. Nevermind the fact that Obama’s speech wound up being totally innocuous, completely devoid of politics whatsoever, and called upon this nation’s students to take pride in their education, trying hard, and doing their best to achieve their goals. Nevermind that, as Time.com‘s Michael Scherer put it, “President Obama’s speech to your kids reads like a paean to individual striving and free market capitalism, the sort of thing that Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater might have signed onto. At root, Obama’s message is one of individual responsibility, a disquisition on the freedom of American youth to fail or succeed on their own tenacity and merits,” and was anything but “lefty, neo-socialist, communitarian brainwashing.”
Never mind that this country’s education system is already tailor-made to spread misinformation, entrench mythologies, and promote American exceptionalism to our young children. American history, as taught in schools, is generally nonsense meant to instill and preserve a sense of City-on-a-Hill nationalism, along with healthy doses of tall-tale founding myths, gung-ho militarism, and ethnic cleansing justification in the form of righteous Manifest Destiny. As James W. Loewen explains in his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, textbooks used to teach our children “leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character.” More to the point, Helen Keller (y’know the deaf, mute, and blind kid who was actually a radical and progressive political thinker, one of the founders of the ACLU, and a staunch supporter of the NAACP and actual socialism) stated clearly why American history is made up of gross simplifications and hero worship: “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions…Conclusions are not always pleasant.” Anyone who has actually studied real American history knows this to be true.
Students in the United States are taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America and proved that the earth was round (not true); they are not taught that Columbus was a genocidal manic (true). Institutionalized racism and ethnocentrism is all but ignored in history class, Native Americans are demonized as savages (they weren’t) and colonists (who were savages) are celebrated as civilized co-existers. (The reason the Pilgrims in New England had such bountiful crops is because all the Native Americans who planted them had either died from European-borne plague or had fled in fear of plague, which John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called “miraculous.”) Students are taught that Albert Einstein failed his math class (he didn’t, and was, in fact, a mathematical prodigy by the age of 12). They learn that Isaac Newton was hit on the head by a falling apple and “discovered” gravity (not true), Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a storm and “discovered” electricity (also not true), and that George Washington chopped down his father’s prized cherry-tree and then didn’t lie about doing it. (This is a fairy tale created by a man named Mason Locke “Parson” Weems, author of the “biography” The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen, in which Weems recalled many fantastic, adulatory confabulations about a fabulously deified Washington, with particular emphasis on his overwhelming moral fortitude and infallibility. At various points in the work, Weems refers to Washington as a “hero,” a “demigod,” “the Jupiter Conservator” [or, “Jupiter, Savior of the World”] and, quite simply, the “greatest man that ever lived”.)
Perhaps it was Weems’ Washington biography that Bryan Fischer wants children to read while they’re busy skipping Obama’s speech. Additionally, what makes Fischer’s suggestion that the President’s speech would turn “the minds of an entire generation to mush” especially ironic is that the school system in this country already is doing just fine pulverizing truth and stifling critical thought without Obama’s help.
Nevermind that in November 1988, President Ronald Reagan spoke directly to students on political issues via C-Span. During his address, Reagan even called taxes “such a penalty on people that there’s no incentive for them to prosper…because they have to give so much to the government.” Nevermind that in 1989, President George H.W. Bush spoke to America’s youth about drugs via a live television feed. Then, in 1991, he delivered another speech on the value of education via a telecast on CNN and PBS. Media Matters for America reminds us that “while president, George H.W. Bush gave a speech to schoolchildren intended ‘to motivate America’s students to strive for excellence; to increase students’ as well as parents’ responsibility/accountability; and to promote students’ and parents’ awareness of the educational challenge we face.'” According to an article inThe Washington Post from October 2, 1991, the “White House sent letters to schools across the nation to encourage teachers and principals to allow students to tune in the speech, which was also carried live by the Mutual Broadcasting and NBC Radio Network. The live television and radio coverage was arranged at the request of the Education Department.”
Nevermind that, as researcher Simon Maloy points out, George W. Bush posted a “teacher’s guide” on the White House website intended to help students understand the “freedom timeline” and encouraged them to “explor[e] the biographies of the President, Mrs. Bush, Vice President, and Mrs. Cheney.”
Nevermind that Obama tells our nation’s children, “What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future,” while Bush promoted an agenda to make the United States, in his own words, “a more literate country and a hopefuller country,” especially by urging us, in a May 1, 2002 speech, to “take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic society.” Whereas on Tuesday Obama spoke of responsibility and accountability, encouraging our young students to stay in school and to “develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country,” Bush told a crowd in South Carolina on February 21, 2001 that if “you teach a child to read…he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” Bush also pointed out, in early January of 2000, that “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures” and philosophically mused that “Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?” Sure, Obama may have motivated whole classrooms full of young, inspired minds with his hopeful expectations when he concluded that “Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future,” but Bush hit the nail on the head when, in LaCrosse, Wisconsin on October 18, 2000, he dazzled his audience with this deft word-smithery: “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
And yet, apparently it didn’t seem dangerous for that man to be allowed to talk to children. In school.
Wow.
But hey, regardless of everything else, one thing seems clear. The right-wing commentators attacking Obama’s student address all seem to have something in common: they sure do love America’s innocent children and want to protect them, at all costs, from the malevolent machinations (whether Fascist or Communist..or both, together, no matter how mutually exclusive they may be) of a nefarious federal government brain trust. How dare the commander-in-chief and his minions seek to manipulate, indoctrinate, and take advantage of our country’s young people by luring them into blindly supporting and advancing the president’s every whim? How can decent, freedom-loving, and patriotic citizens simply stand back and do nothing about the looming specter of brainwashed hordes of American students, duped and enlisted by an administration’s imperial motivations and ideological agenda, pouring out of government schools as robotic, unthinking recruits and unwitting defenders of a terrifyingly authoritarian regime?
