As soon as he has the children in tow, it’s but a short step to having them report “fishy” activities of the parents to a special hotline or web site. That’s just another reason home schooling is so important.

But Sev, Carlos, and ClassicFilm are also right – in view of the DOE “study guide” and Obama’s narcissism (Ed Morrissey notes that he used the word “I” more than he used the words “school”, “education”, “responsibility”, “country”, “parents”, “teachers”, and “nation” combined), I have little doubt that the clamor raised by parents and conservative watchdogs prevented a far more partisan and self-indulgent speech. Considering the left’s educational agenda, that’s something we must monitor rigorously as well.

I agree with you, Sister Toldjah, on picking the right battles to wage. I just feel that this was indeed one of the right battles.

Spot on, and a much more succinct way of saying in one line what took me six paragraphs.

I feel I talk a lot about my conservative politics with my children and it is amazing how much of that does trickle into their little heads when they are young. They just have a rough time in the teens/young adult period when they are inundated with a lot of different ideas. But I have noticed with my son, who will be 26, that he has taken on a more conservative outlook on life. It is encouraging to me, at least. I was a lot more liberal and a democrat many moons ago….parenthood made me grow up and see the world for what it is.

The lesson plans put forth by the White House, that were posted by DOE, were yanked before I had a chance to review them. But I’ve read from other people’s posts and blogs that they considered them “creepy.” I don’t know if I would have viewed them as such, I’m just relaying what I’ve read. IMHO a small battle that had the potential of becoming Pandora’s box was averted.

I agree with you, Sister Toldjah, on picking the right battles to wage. I just feel that this was indeed one of the right battles. Leaking dike plugged on this one for now… next battles, ObamaCare and Waxman-Markey.

And if that’s the case, the good guys had every right and responsibility to scream “FOUL” and make them back up at 100 MPH.

Our children are the only resource that, in the end, really count when we leave this earth. We can’t leave them to those who push the collectivist vision because that’s leaving them absolutely nothing except a hard life.

Life is hard enough as it is. Don’t let them make it any harder.

Where he needs to be watched is not in some speech where everyone can hear what he’s saying and verbally blast him if he came anything close to sounding like a proponent of leftie indoctrination, but instead both he and his admin need to be watched with the fine print, like in the study guides and things like that where they think no one is paying attention. That’s where the leftist war on traditional educational values will be waged.

Let’s save our energy for the bigger battles we will continue to wage against this administration on a number of issues…Compared to those things, his speech to school kids is small potatoes, IMO.

I have to disagree respectfully with ST on this point. She’s right about all the issues where we must fight, but we must be just as vigilant about preventing the left from indoctrinating the young. It’s bad enough that leftist propaganda is woven into school curricula at nearly every level. Allowing the DOE to issue “study guides” encouraging teachers to assign students to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” would make it even worse.

Part of the left’s strategy is to warp the minds of the young and impressionable as early as possible. To them, it’s part of the same political process as working for unrestricted abortion and quitting in the war on terror:

That’s one of the things that’s actually annoyed me for about 40 years of being a progressive educator: the separation of the concept of progressive education from the concept of politics and political change. You can’t separate them. – Bill Ayers

It will do us little good in the long term if we win every battle this year “on the war on terror, cap and trade, the free market, ObamaCare, union favoritism, the rights of the unborn, etc.” – and then lose on all those fronts in ten years because the left has drummed Obamaism into the skulls of the next generation.

Lest anyone think that Obama isn’t exactly in tune with Ayers, think of the job Obama did as head of the Annenberg Challenge. Given $100 million by Ayers to spend on improving education in Chicago, every bit of it went to left-wing racial identification or radical movement functions. Nothing went to programs to help inner city kids improve in math, or science, or anything that might help them succeed as adults; in fact, some existing programs along those lines were terminated to drain the money to leftist ideological pursuits. So whatever Obama might have read off the teleprompter today about “learning”, forget it. He didn’t mean it then and he didn’t mean it now.

Make no mistake – the Community Organizer in Chief sees our young as another community to be organized and manipulated. The difference between Obama in Chicago and Obama in the White House is the thoroughly creepy cult of personality that he and the MSM are trying to construct around Dear Leader. It’s not an accident that the mindless Hollywood celebrities in the “pledge” video do not pledge their support for America – they pledge it to Obama.

Organizing the young to become mindless drones dedicated to the state is a fixture of leftist totalitarian regimes. Name one that didn’t have its version of the Comsomol.

As for the liberals’ dark accusations that Bush was using his address to the schools for political purposes, by now every regular ST reader surely knows that whenever a leftist accuses someone of some heinous act – a culture of corruption, racism, astroturfing – it’s because they’re guilty of the same deed and are trying to distract public attention.

So I for one do not think this is “small potatoes”. It’s another important front in the struggle against leftist domination.

Same crap, different day.

Yes, and I agree with Bertie; the issues do not necessarily run along party lines. I know some Dems who are not thrilled with their “fearless leader.” And neither Bush nor Reagan were anti-American. Neither of them flew around the globe apologizing for the USA!
I don’t have any children in school anymore, but the truth is I became an educator when the public school agenda no longer promoted my values.

In 1991, “they” did not really care what the president said or what the kids heard. Their only interest was in not missing an opportunity to attack.