Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff
Why are so many parents so opposed to President Obama using their children as a captive audience in a speech aimed at classrooms across the country this coming Tuesday?
Well, maybe because they should be.
Maybe it's because almost everything surrounding this president smacks of indoctrination right out of the socialist's playbook.
It begins with the media. Every objective study of the news media shows they are avid supporters of Obama. The entertainment media are even worse: Have you seen the video of celebrities pledging their support to Obama and his agenda? It includes this gem from actress Demi Moore: "I pledge to be a servant to our president."
Come again? An American? Pledging to be a servant of an elected leader? That's more than childish or doltish. In a historically free country, at a time in which government is growing like a leviathan, that's just dangerous thinking.
It's at least encouraging that, despite the naked ambition of this administration to indoctrinate us to his health care plan and more -- the ceaseless prime time speeches (including a joint session of Congress next Wednesday), the media fawning, and now the school speech aimed at our kids -- his popularity and that of his proposals is sinking fast.
That doesn't stop them from trying. And they are trying. Relentlessly.
That's why his plan to speak to your children while you're at work is so transparent, and is leading so many parents to keep their kids home Tuesday or to lobby their schools not to show it.
It would be one thing if the president were planning to simply pump up the kids about the need to work hard in school. But initial curriculum materials provided by the feds asked students to "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president." After understandable howls of protest, the U.S. Department of Education revised it to say, "write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals."
A little different goal, no? But how obvious can they get at having tried to co-opt youngsters into the Obama cult?
That's what parents object to -- as well as the federal government's uninterrupted march into the sanctity of our children's education, which never has been any of Washington's business .
Thankfully, schools in Richmond and Columbia counties say the president's speech was thrust upon them too quickly -- again, probably by design, to avoid just this kind of firestorm -- for schools to accommodate the event.
So it won't be just thrust into our classrooms.
Columbia County Schools Superintendent Charles Nagle is encouraging parents to record the speech and discuss it with their children. Teachers can discuss it with pupils, but only after administrators view the speech. In Richmond County, teachers may show the speech, but won't be required to.
Maybe parents and teachers could take back the role of classroom coach?
Calling it Obama's "Dear Leader" speech -- referring to the North Korean dictator's nickname -- The (Washington) Examiner wrote, quite rightly, that even without the see-through political agenda, "providing mass life-counseling to school kids is not what presidents are elected to do."
And it even all appears illegal! The U.S. Code prohibits federal officials from exercising "any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system."
One observer smartly suggested that if the White House wants to direct kids' learning at all, it should point in the vicinity of the Constitution.
Clearly, Obama's attempt to indoctrinate the rest of us will go on.
But leave our kids the heck alone, Mr. President.
