Jordy Blog

More School Brainwashing: Obama Kids

In keeping with my recent meme of covering public-school brainwashing, I give you the Obama Kids.

My favorite comment: “That must be the new ‘Future Czars of America’ class.”  Too true.

(Link via Campaign for Liberty.)

If you liked this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

President Obama’s Address to Students Across America

Obama will speak to public school children this Tuesday, September 8th. Here is the full text of a document issued by the U.S. Department of Education on how teachers can use the address as a “teaching” moment:

PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama’s Address to Students Across America

Produced by Teaching Ambassador Fellows, U.S. Department of Education

September 8, 2009

Before the Speech:

• Teachers can build background knowledge about the President of the United States and his speech by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama and motivate students by asking the following questions:
  • Who is the President of the United States?
  • What do you think it takes to be President?
  • To whom do you think the President is going to be speaking?
  • Why do you think he wants to speak to you?
  • What do you think he will say to you?
• Teachers can ask students to imagine being the President delivering a speech to all of the students in the United States. What would you tell students? What can students do to help in our schools? Teachers can chart ideas about what they would say.
• Why is it important that we listen to the President and other elected officials, like the mayor, senators, members of congress, or the governor? Why is what they say important?

During the Speech:

• As the President speaks, teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful. Students could use a note-taking graphic organizer such as a Cluster Web, or students could record their thoughts on sticky notes. Younger children can draw pictures and write as appropriate. As students listen to the speech, they could think about the following:
  • What is the President trying to tell me?
  • What is the President asking me to do?
  • What new ideas and actions is the President challenging me to think about?
• Students can record important parts of the speech where the President is asking them to do something. Students might think about: What specific job is he asking me to do? Is he asking anything of anyone else? Teachers? Principals? Parents? The American people?
• Students can record any questions they have while he is speaking and then discuss them after the speech. Younger children may need to dictate their questions.

After the Speech:

• Teachers could ask students to share the ideas they recorded, exchange sticky notes or stick notes on a butcher paper poster in the classroom to discuss main ideas from the speech, i.e. citizenship, personal responsibility, civic duty.
• Students could discuss their responses to the following questions:
  • What do you think the President wants us to do?
  • Does the speech make you want to do anything?
  • Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?
  • What would you like to tell the President?

• Teachers could encourage students to participate in the Department of Education’s “I Am What I Learn” video contest. On September 8^th the Department will invite K-12 students to submit a video no longer than 2 min, explaining why education is important and how their education will help them achieve their dreams. Teachers are welcome to incorporate the same or a similar video project into an assignment. More details will be released via www.ed.gov.

Extension of the Speech: Teachers can extend learning by having students

• Create posters of their goals. Posters could be formatted in quadrants or puzzle pieces or trails marked with the labels: personal, academic, community, country. Each area could be labeled with three steps for achieving goals in those areas. It might make sense to focus on personal and academic so community and country goals come more readily.
• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.
• Write goals on colored index cards or precut designs to post around the classroom.
• Interview and share about their goals with one another to create a supportive community.
• Participate in School wide incentive programs or contests for students who achieve their goals.
• Write about their goals in a variety of genres, i.e. poems, songs, personal essays.
• Create artistic projects based on the themes of their goals.
• Graph student progress toward goals.

This is dangerous, in my opinion.  I don’t care what party a public leader is from, they should not have direct access to children in their classrooms.

But this is what happens when your tax dollars are filtered through the leviathan state.  It inevitably uses them against you.

Why are we subsidizing this stuff?  And why do we not have a decent way to opt out (and into a private school) without incurring additional –dare I say punitive– costs?

All this reminds me of a couple of quotes I’ve used before:

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.

–Milton Friedman, Economist. Awarded 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”

Karl Marx – Father of Communism (1848)

Finally, some NEA Honesty

Hopefully this video of a retiring NEA veteran telling us what he really thinks will shame some of our local UEA members out of sending their dues to the National Education Association.

If nothing else, the video repudiates any notion that the NEA and its affiliates –the same labor unions that convinced Utahns to kill education vouchers– are really looking out for you and yours.

Some choice quotes:

“… Why are these conservative and right-wing bastards picking on NEA and its affiliates? I will tell you why: it is the price we pay for success. NEA and its affiliates have been singled out because they are the most effective unions in the United States, and they are the nation’s leading advocates for public education and the type of liberal, social, and economic agenda that these groups find unacceptable.”

No argument there! But, it wouldn’t be near so bad if that liberal, social, and economic agenda wasn’t constantly trickling into the classrooms!

Another:

“And that brings me to my final and most important point, which is why, at least in my opinion, NEA and its affiliates are such effective advocates. Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas; it is not because of the merit of our positions; it is not because we care about children; and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have POWER. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us more hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year –because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees. [Standing applause]

This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary, these are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay!

Wait, so collective bargaining (protecting your pocketbooks at taxpayer expense), and due process (making it difficult to fire bad teachers) are more important than having good teachers –teachers who are actually successful at educating children?

Think about that, seriously. They say protecting teachers is more important than reducing the dropout rate –the very minimal standard of educational achievement. What kind of backwards priority is that? Is it any wonder the US is getting is getting lackluster results?

Continuing:

When all is said and done, NEA and its affiliates must never lose sight of the fact that they are unions; and what what unions do, first and foremost, is represent their members.”

Yeah, tell me about it. If only there was some organization that represented schoolchildren and their parents… Oh wait, there is!

If you didn’t watch the video, please watch it! I’m afraid that much of the smugness just can’t come across in plain text.

A Moratorium on Reason

Well, they lied to us, and we believed them. Shame on them, and shame on us.

I’ve got a lot to say, but I’ll forbear for now.

Personally, I’m going to keep fighting for parents’ choice in education, although I don’t really know in what capacity. I hope you’re as angry as I am so that you will too. As a whole, we didn’t fight hard enough; but next time we’ll know better. We owe it to our children not to give up.

I’ll leave you for now with a selection of quotes, mostly from Conner’s blog.

“…A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.”

James R. Otteson, professor of philosophy. – The Independent Review, Spring 2000, “Freedom of Religion and Public Schooling”

“If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.”

Milton Friedman, Economist. Awarded 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.

“By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling … has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.”

John Taylor Gatto, Source: Dumbing Us Down, p. 85

“In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge…In creating a monopoly of education, the government must answer to the hopes of the fathers of families who have thus been deprived of their liberty; and if these hopes are shattered whose fault is it? We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say we are opposed to any education.”

Frederic Bastiat, The Law , 1850

“Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.

“This is the seductive lure of socialism.”

Frederic Bastiat, Source: The Law, p. 25

“I am opposed to free education as much as I am opposed to taking property from one man and giving it to another who knows not how to take care of it. I do not believe in allowing my charities to go through the hands of robbers who pocket nine-tenths themselves and give one tenth to the poor. Would I encourage free schools by taxation? No!”

Brigham Young, Source: Journal of Discourses Vol. 18, p. 357

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”

“ Karl Marx – Father of Communism (1848)