Obama: Banned from my children’s school

on Sep 03 in Politics tagged by Trevor Hicks

Our school principal has elected not to show Obama’s address to the nation’s schoolchildren next week.  I think that’s ridiculous. If you’ve read me for a while, you know I’m not a big fan of Obama, but then I think Bush & McCain suck even worse so go figure out where I am on the partisan map. Anyway, here’s the email I sent to our principal:

I’m sure you’ll hear quite a few messages of both support and disappointment regarding your decision not to show Obama’s address so I appreciate that you are in a situation where it would be impossible to please everyone.  Unfortunately you have made the wrong choice.

Here are the salient facts as I see them:

1) He is the President. Asking the kids to listen to a Presidential address directed towards them is, in my opinion, no different than asking them to be respectful for the Pledge of Allegiance or the Star Spangled Banner.  I would expect my children to listen respectfully to a speech from, for instance, the principal of their school even if they disagreed with her.  Refusing to listen is disrespectful to the office.

2) There is no reason to believe that the content of this speech will be in any way morally objectionable or inappropriate for children of this age level.  Our children do not need to be protected from Obama.

3) The message, as I understand it, is completely non-political and indeed supposed to be one of welcoming the kids back to school and encouraging them to study hard and use education as an important tool to help them achieve their life goals.  Obama himself is an excellent example of the power of education to transform a life and, as a very skilled orator, likely to be extremely persuasive in a positive manner for our children.  Refusing to show such a speech is much more of a political act than the speech itself.

4) The loss of instructional time is not a reasonable pretext to avoid the broadcast.  Not that I’m complaining about time devoted to holiday parties and other such community-building activities done in the classroom, but really there are plenty of school-sanctioned activities that we could cut half an hour from if we had to make room in the curriculum for this speech.

I’m usually very good at seeing the other side of an argument but honestly I have neither heard nor can I think of a single valid reason not to show Obama’s address at school.

Respectfully yours -

Trevor Hicks