The Afternoon Buzz: Indoctrinate or Inspire? Reagan Told Students to Embrace Guns & Tax Cuts, While GOP Tells Kids They Can't Think for Themselves
BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White
President Barack Obama spoke before what I'd posit was one of his toughest audiences in his presidency so far: American high school students. President Obama's speech Tuesday at Wakefield High School in Arlington, VA was met with a screaming, standing ovation and copious handshakes and thank-yous in the rope line on his way out.
Listening to the reaction from listeners who called into C-SPAN, not one person had a negative comment about the speech, except to criticize the prejudgment of some conservative parents who threatened to keep their kids home from school so as not to allow their indoctrination by the president's words.
You can always count on first ladies to stand up for education and children. In an interview on CNN this weekend, former First Lady Laura Bush came to the defense of President Obama's plan to speak to schoolchildren on this first day back to school for many students across the country.
Bush also noted that it was the socialist lesson plan, not the potential words of encouragement our president planned to give to America's schoolchildren, that had everyone all riled up. Of course, when a person can easily read the speech online beforehand and see that there's absolutely nothing indoctrinating or political about it, it's pretty tough to describe it as propaganda.
However, even the charges of a politicized lesson plan ring hollow after watching the speech. Every person who called in within the first few minutes of the discussion on C-SPAN immediately following the speech used some iteration of the word "inspiration" to describe the speech. After over a half-dozen people in a row used this word, one wonders about the widespread negative reaction to the lesson plan question, "What is President Obama inspiring you to do?"
Let's consider these questions instead: Would President Obama ever venture to think he could get away with saying anything that could in any way be construed as political or -- gasp -- socialist? Would he hawk his economic theories or push his religion on innocent students?
Now that the speech is over and safely squirreled away in the C-SPAN archives, we can safely say that Obama will have to leave that kind of craven politicking to his rivals, opponents and previous occupants of the White House.
The ringleader of the anti-Obama school speech crowd could be considered to be Florida's Jim Greer. I'll let Mona Gable, a journalist specializing in parenting, introduce you:
Greer, the chairman of Florida's Republican Party, has been the most vocal, if not the most literate, opponent of Obama's speech. (An aside here: Notice how it is always Florida and Texas that cause such a political ruckus?)
If you didn't have the pleasure of seeing the Senate hopeful on the news, here's what Greer said in a press release:
As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology. President Obama has turned to the American's [sic] children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American's [sic] youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.
Asked repeatedly where he got the notion that Obama was going to talk about health care and other policy matters when he hadn't actually read the text, Greer strangely couldn't answer.
This is just my take, but it appears that Greer is comfortable using his children as a political football by depriving them of their education for a day to perpetuate a myth about the president and to get some free press ahead of his Senate run.
Oh, wait; after he saw the text of the speech, Greer said he'd let his kids watch it. I wonder if he would have been OK with another U.S. president's speech containing propaganda over what the tax code should be, the role of government and the idea that students should study moral precepts alongside science and English.
He probably would, but only because that president was Ronald Reagan. In November 1988, just after the election that determined his successor, Reagan trucked in kids from a handful of different high schools to the White House and held a kind of press conference in which he gave a speech and answered a few questions from the students.
At the establishment of American Education Week, he told them to study the religious foundations upon which our great country was founded.
"We will also need to reaffirm our traditional moral values, because these values are the foundation on which everything we do is built," Reagan said in his prepared remarks. "It's also a moral vision, grounded in the reverence and faith of those who believe that with God's help, they could create a free and democratic nation."
Talk about indoctrination! Reagan also redefined American freedom in economic terms (emphasis mine):
But America's world leadership goes well beyond the tide toward democracy. We also find that more countries than ever before are following America's revolutionary economic message of free enterprise, low taxes and open world trade. These days whenever I see foreign leaders they tell me about their plans for reducing taxes and other economic reforms that they're using, copying what we've done in this country. I wonder if they realize that this vision of economic freedom, the freedom to work, to create, to produce, to own, and use property without the interference of the state, was central to the American revolution.
(Hmm, I wonder! Let's ask the Contras, shall we?)
Here Reagan expertly uses the founding fathers myth Republicans love so well to justify his current economic policies. Can you imagine if President Obama's prepared remarks to schoolchildren contained, say, a justification of the stimulus package using the New Deal as an example of the Americans' historical commitment to investing in their country's future?
But instead, Obama's vision of how the past relates to the future of this country was quite different that the self-serving city-on-a-hill rhetoric often employed by Reagan. From Obama's prepared remarks today:
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.
It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
In contrast, Reagan took the time to "inspire" students to support the ability of presidents to have line-item veto power and to be required by the Constitution to balance the budget each year.
But, just as I'm sure today's students won't buy every word of President Obama's speech, a few challenged Reagan in the Q&A after his speech. One asked if future generations wouldn't be saddled by the debt created by tax cuts. Another asked Reagan what he thought about the gun ban, to which the president replied with a complaint that he'd have to wait a whole five days to get a gun, even though he's the president of the United States. How unfair!
But ultimately what Greer and other conservatives fail to do here is give American students credit. Kids have opinions and are truly free-thinkers in the sense that do not come preset ideologically. Though the teaching of critical thinking skills has fallen off from what it once was, kids can see when an argument doesn't make sense, and they're excellent at detecting and decrying inequality and injustice.
Thing is, you have to actually be interested in what they think to know that. If you tell kids they're going to be brainwashed by listening to the president speak, you're only going to succeed in insulting their intelligence or making them feel powerless.
If you tell kids it doesn't matter what they think or whether they go to school or not, they're probably not going to chime in with their thoughts, nor are they going to care much what you think. But more than anything else, they're not going to be motivated to work hard in school or think for themselves.
The difference between Reagan's speech more than 20 years ago and Obama's speech today is that Reagan told kids what he believed about American government and Obama galvanized them to work harder. In all likelihood, neither of them were written with the purpose of indoctrination. But only one of them truly inspired.
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