EDMOND — The furor over President Barack Obama’s proposed speech to school children on Tuesday truly reflects how polarized our nation’s citizens continue to be when it comes to the political arena.
On the one hand, presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs’ statement that the uproar is reaching “a little bit of the silly season” shows that Obama’s White House doesn’t remember that just under half the voters cast ballots for the other guy last November. When a presidential candidate attains such a slim majority in an election, it would seem somewhat careless of him to take all those no votes with opposing viewpoints for granted.
On the other hand, though, the claim by the opposition that Obama’s Tuesday speech is taking the federal government too far into public school business seems a bit of a stretch. Have we all forgotten President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which is one of the most far-reaching pieces of education legislation experienced in this country? The constraints and mandates of this act put the federal government squarely in the middle of local school districts’ business and continue to do so today.
So when assessing this debate, we have to ask ourselves is it really about governmental intrusion in our schools, is it about respecting parental rights or is it just another opportunity to say, hey, I really don’t like that guy in the White House and what he stands for?
Oklahoma educators just this past weekend heard from distinguished education professor Young Zhao, who maintains that America’s education system is actually quite competitive globally. He cautioned that the nation’s test-based approach is leading to a generation of students who are “lower-level, left-brain directed,” and urged both educators and students to be more broad-minded in their approaches to learning and educating.
“I believe most educators are willing to do something good for their kids. We need to trust them and give them the tools to improve and not try to squeeze them (with more mandates),” Zhao told participants of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association annual conference in Oklahoma City.
With that in mind, we would agree that more federal intrusion in the daily business of our local school districts is not a benefit to the nation’s educational system nor our children. We support parents who are involved in their child’s education and absolutely respect parents’ rights to opt out of their child watching the speech on Tuesday.
But we also urge all of those parents to read the release of Obama’s speech online on Monday before they make up their mind on the issue. Whether your child watches the speech at school or not, some of the best gifts parents can give their students are the tools for how to sift fact from opinion, how to make good judgments on their own in the future and how to respect others even if their viewpoints are different from theirs.
