If the president of the United States wants to try to inspire American children to become better students by speaking directly to them, he should be welcomed into every public school classroom in the country.
Instead, Barack Obama’s plan to address the nation’s schoolchildren has invoked a furor among some who believe the president is playing politics with young people. Parents are threatening to keep their kids home from school.
Get a grip, people. It’s not as if he’s shaking down kids to get milk money for campaign donations or asking the students to lobby their parents for his health care reform.
The 15- to 20-minute speech is said to be about personal responsibility, about persisting and succeeding in school.
Remember when Obama was first elected and there was a wave of stories about how inspired young minority children were to see a bi-racial man achieve the nation’s highest office? Those same young people, and others, need to hear the president’s message and get motivated to spread their books out on the kitchen table and do their homework.
It has been clear from Obama’s own life story, his comments on the campaign trail and his administration’s focus on education initiatives that this is a president who deeply believes in the transformative power of education.
“I don’t come from a lot of wealth,” he said in July, when speaking about the importance of education in his own life. “I got into my share of trouble as a kid. My life could easily have taken a turn for the worse. But that mother of mine gave me love; she pushed me, and cared about my education; she took no lip and taught me right from wrong.
“Because of her, I had a chance to make the most of my abilities. I had the chance to make the most of my opportunities. I had the chance to make the most of life.”
Appealing directly to kids to take personal responsibility for their education is just another step along those lines.
However, there is no need for the Department of Education to send out a lesson plan outlining how teachers can talk about the speech in their classes. The administration also wisely dumped the idea of asking kids to think about how they can help Barack Obama.
Still, the classroom activities outlined seem rather banal and we would think — we would hope — that our nation’s teachers would have some idea how to prompt discussion among children about the president’s address. They are teachers, after all.
A quick classroom chat about the importance of school work is fine, but shorter is better. Students, after all, have work to do, such as catching up with the other countries that have surpassed us in math and science.
Urging our nation’s children to hit the books and make something of themselves isn’t political indoctrination. It’s the kind of leadership we should welcome from the nation’s chief executive.
