Teaching students to fear Obama’s speech is the wrong lesson

The audacity of the man!

How dare the president take precious time away from the curriculum to tell students about the value of education.

How dare President Bush address children to urge them to work hard and stay in school.

Oh, wait, it isn’t either of the President Bushes whose classroom addresses are being lambasted by hysterical political foes.

It’s President Barack Obama’s plan to give a televised speech on education to schoolchildren that has Obama haters railing about a sinister plot to indoctrinate impressionable minds with his "leftist-socialist ideology."

This is simply irresponsible fear-mongering.

What ever happened to respect for the office of the presidency? What ever happened to using a presidential speech as a teachable moment — for lively, reasoned discussion about everything from the role of the executive branch to the role of the federal government in public schools?

Some school districts are debating whether to air the president’s planned speech on Tuesday because officials aren’t sure about interrupting lesson plans or about their buildings’ capacity to handle the video feed. Legitimate concerns.

But others are responding to astounding complaints from parents and political activists who, having not even seen what Obama plans to say, insist he’s going to propagate a political message that’s inappropriate for children to hear.

American schoolchildren should not be taught to fear their president, no matter what political party he belongs to.

This country still chooses its president in free and open elections, and the individual who serves in that office serves all the people, not just those who agree with him.

Obama is not the first president to address students, and he shouldn’t be the last. (Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke to high schoolers, and George W. Bush was reading in a Florida classroom on Sept. 11, 2001.) Young people should be able to learn from listening to their president.

Teachers could use Obama’s address to prompt discussions about personal responsibility, about the economic worth of a high school and college education, about the president’s leadership role, even about technology’s evolution from the days of Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats to Obama’s social-media savvy. Classes that don’t watch on Tuesday could use video of the speech later when appropriate as an enrichment tool.

The sample questions that the Education Department has placed on its Web site might be helpful to teachers or not. They’re suggestions, not mandates, and good teachers know how to incorporate resource materials or develop their own.

It’s Americans’ right and responsibility to question and criticize government as a way of holding officials accountable. Policy disagreements are inevitable and can be healthy as Americans seek to build the "more perfect union" envisioned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

That very Constitution is the foundation for vigorous debate of all sorts of ideas, and students should be taught to cherish and exercise that freedom.

It’s one thing to disagree, even vehemently, with a president. But it’s a sad day when some adults want to cover students’ ears, shield their eyes, hold them out of school and teach them that an American president’s words are to be shunned and detested, even before they’re spoken.

For the first U.S. president of African-American heritage to tell students — especially those who get a different message from other sources — that they should take responsibility for their education and for their futures, well, that’s not leftist or socialist or propagandistic. It’s a message worth listening to and applauding.

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