Parental control

With the stage set at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., for President Barack Obama’s Tuesday address to students extolling the virtues of academic achievement, perseverance in the face of adversity and redistributing the wealth. Conservatives across the country were up in arms to defend the hearts and minds of America’s impressionable youngsters.

Their fears stoked by the ramblings of wingnut pundits and opportunistic politicians, concerned parents and inundated school boards nationwide, with demands that Obama’s speech not be shown during school hours, or that they be given the choice to opt their children out of viewing it.

Undoubtedly this made for an awkward emergency PTA meeting or two; one can almost conjure mental images of Helen Lovejoy aghast, shrilly shrieking “won’t somebody please think of the children?”

Although concerns naturally varied – Florida Republican party chairman Jim Greer expressed incredulity at taxpayer dollars being used to perpetuate socialist ideology, while others fretted about an Obama “cult of personality” – parents everywhere objected to leaving their kids unattended with such a disreputable character as the president.

Obama – as he has been when pressed on any issue – found himself squarely on the defensive once again.

Seeking to reassure administrators, teachers and parents alike that the speech carried with it no ulterior motive or subversive communist agenda, the White House released the text of the speech for pre-screening Monday afternoon.

Quite shockingly, the president’s education speech did, in fact, pertain solely to education, leaving sane Americans everywhere to wonder what exactly all the hullabaloo was about.

Certainly politics have no place in the classroom; students attend school in order to be educated in the sciences, mathematics, histories, languages and arts that enrich the individual and perpetuate a vibrant and dynamic society, not to be indoctrinated with any particular ideology.

One can only wonder, therefore, where the same pervasive sense of indignation was on May 13, 1986, when then-President Ronald Reagan gave a similar nationally televised address to the students of John A. Holmes High School in Edenton, N.C.
Perpetrating the same offense for which Obama’s detractors have prematurely prosecuted him, Reagan used the pulpit to explicitly espouse his political agenda, paying particular attention to advocate his supply-side economic policies.

One would certainly assume that those who object to a Democrat president discussing education with the nation’s children under the pretense that it might turn political might apply this same standard to a Republican.

Consistency and intellectual honesty, of course, are not the conservative fringe’s strong suits.

The reactionary rabble-rousers who have recently crawled out of the woodwork to indiscriminately undermine Obama have found no issue with using the classroom as a venue for promoting particular belief systems, so long as they’re belief systems with which they agree.

Conservatives in several school districts have gleefully subjected other peoples’ children to such absurdities as abstinence-only sex education and creationism being taught as a legitimate “scientific” doctrine.

In the future, it would be best if these parents learned to heed their own advice and keep the politics out of the classroom.