Monday, September 07, 2009

The President Will Be Speaking ...

My second and last child has now graduated from Mt. Lebanon schools, so for blogosphere thoughts on what Mt. Lebanon decided to do with tomorrow's address to the nation's public school students by President Obama, I will quote Suburbia Calling, another Mt. Lebanon-based blog, written by the parent of a Lebo kindergartner:
The President of the United States would like to speak to school children this coming Tuesday and people, some people, are outraged? I'm left wondering what in the world are we becoming as a country? I'm the mom of a Mt. Lebanon kindergartner. According to a Jon Delano KDKA report, Mt. Lebanon has decided to allow each teacher the choice to show the President's address if it's relevant to what they are doing. Talk about being clever and slippery. I disagree with Mt. Lebanon's decision. ... make a firm decision would ya? It's wishy washy and sends a message to students that an address from the President of the United States to them is not necessarily important...it might be important...it might not...it depends on well, well, which camp your teacher resides in!

Here is the whole thing.
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5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is issue is so ridiculous!

I have also heard that some districts are sending out permission slips before they will let a student view the speech. Its the President of the United States people! Where is all that “respect the office” stuff I heard about when he was sworn in? If any parents or teachers or students for that matter disagree with something he says, then just talk about it in school or at home. I think that is essentially what we did when Reagan appeared on TV in my class. I would love to know what school board members/candidates think about this.

Nick Jones

September 08, 2009 12:00 AM  
Anonymous Bob Reich, Jr. said...

Nobody can despise BO more than I do. (Any of you fans ever wonder how a state senator & "community organizer" could afford a multi-million dollar house in Chicago? And this was way before he "wrote" a book. Or why his wife was given a made up job that didn't exist before she came along and was never back-filled when she left? Hmmm.) But even I don't have a problem with this speech as written.

Especially because it's so long kids will have tuned out by the second paragraph.

September 08, 2009 8:40 AM  
Blogger Tim Nolan said...

Nick,

You're right, this is fantastically ridiculous! The President wants to send all the right messages to school kids, and the tin-foil hat wearing/birther crowd pitched a nutty. Now millions of kids will be taught that they cannot be trusted with the ability to listen and decide for themselves--or god forbid even discuss. Rather, the "adults" will do the censoring for them.
Objectively, the President's message is a healthy and positive one, and one that educators would gladly support.
This is a really disgraceful moment for our country.

September 08, 2009 9:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bob, do you really want to get into the details of GW Bush's "purchase" of the Texas Rangers and the taxpayer funded stadium that enabled him to sell at an enormous profit. The "fishy business" runs in both directions.
Stu Getz

September 08, 2009 12:51 PM  
Anonymous David Brown said...

Not allowing the speech is a far more blatant bit of propaganda than anything the President's opponents might have read into that study guide. It sends a strong message to children that their parents and teachers are worried that the President might hurt them.

Personally, if the situation somehow arose, I would let any American President babysit my children, give them a bath, read them bedtime stories, and watch TV in our house until we got back home.

Children need to feel safe to learn. Telling them not to trust their President does not make them feel safe. So, to score points against a political foe, the right wing willfully harmed the education of a generation of American children.

That is a slap in the face to America and it is wholly unpatriotic. It is emblematic of the willingness of the right wing to degrade any commons in the furtherance of their goals or the prevention of their enemy's. It part and parcel with with their total abandonment of truth as a rhetorical constraint. Lairs are not shunned, they are made folk heroes.

This is not a behavior to tolerate in civilized society, yet it flourishes.

Why is that?

September 08, 2009 8:24 PM  

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