Fear, Censorship, and Agendas…

I’ve been wanting to write this post for the past three days, but I have been constantly “counting to ten”, hoping to calm down enough to be able to write a coherent post that doesn’t devolve into an angry rant.

I am still not calm enough to write a short essay, so I am just posting my thoughts here in bullets. Perhaps later I can expand on some of these thoughts in a longer post.

First, let me be very clear and say that I think it is absolutely ridiculous that people are protesting the President’s upcoming address to school children and that some schools and districts have actually caved in to the pressure to censor the President’s speech.

Here are the rest of my thoughts on this issue:

• This is NOT unprecedented. It has now been widely reported that previous presidents have made similar addresses to school children in the past. There is nothing wrong with the leader of our country — the President of the United States — making a speech to school children about the importance of staying in school, setting goals, studying hard, and working to succeed.
• If you are offended by the suggested curriculum activities then let me explain the difference between “suggested” and “mandated” to you. A suggestion can be ignored, but a mandate must be followed. I am an educator and most of the educators I know would probably have either not used the SUGGESTED activities or would have only used the ones that applied to their current curriculum. All educators I know, on the other hand, are forced to comply with the UNFUNDED MANDATE of No Child Left Behind — and this HAS hurt our education system far more than a 15 minute speech possibly could.
• If you are so afraid of a socialist agenda then please, remove your child from the tax-payer-funded public schools and please do not apply for Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid at any time in your life. All of those are essentially socialist institutions.
• If the President is making a speech regarding the importance of staying in school and studying hard, then what message are students receiving when they are barred from watching the speech because their parents complained or — even worse — because their parents kept them home from school for the day. Nice.
• The President, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics, does serve as an excellent role model for MANY at-risk minority youth in our country. I see way too many of these students failing, dropping out of school, and joining gangs. It is well known in the education community that too many of these youth end up serving jail time rather than completing school and becoming productive members of society. If the President can have ANY influence over these students then I support his efforts fully. I prefer full classrooms and schools rather than full prisons and correctional facilities.
• What will our children think when they look back on this moment and see how their parents and their educators reacted to this event? How will they view us?
• Why is it okay for so many people to speak so poorly and so disrespectfully of our President now? When Bush was in office and anyone argued with his policies and his actions they were automatically labeled as traitors and terrorist sympathizers. It was NOT okay then to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now it’s perfectly okay to speak out — and to speak dishonestly — about efforts to reform the health care industry and education. This attitude by a certain segment of our population disgusts and saddens me greatly.
• Parents are with their children much longer than teachers and MUCH longer than a 15 minute speech by the President.  Why would anyone who has confidence in their own parenting skills and their own guidance of their children be afraid to let their child listen to such a short speech?  It baffles me.
• Please spare me the “interrupted instructional time” argument. I’ve spent the past ten years working in our public schools and that argument doesn’t work for me. Let’s get rid of during-school-time pep rallies, motivational assemblies, and test-prep pep rallies first before we can use the “interrupted instructional time” argument.
• I am much more concerned about some of the text books being used in our schools than I am about what the President might say in 15 minutes.  Too many of our textbooks are full of inaccuracies or are outdated (science, social studies) — and don’t even get me started on the personal agendas that make their way into textbooks by state-level adoption committees (see recent issue with Texas and Social Studies curriculum).

I’m done. For now. I am sure I have left something out, but I can always come back and update this post.

I am sure that some of you will agree with what I have written and that some of you will disagree with what I have written. If you have more to add to what I have said above, please share your thoughts in the comments.

UPDATE:  I want to be sure and link to others who have also posted some eloquent thoughts on this issue.  Please visit the following links to read more:

The Obama Speech – Will Richardson

Representing More Than 20 Minutes – Ryan Bretag

It IS About Intellectual Freedom, Not Politics — Buffy Gunter Hamilton

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Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.