Education vs. Indoctrination
I'm starting to think we have lost our collective minds. Where else but in modern American can what is sure to be an innocuous Presidential message to students get blown up all out of proportion?
Glenn Beck echoed many critics calling it an "indoctrination of your children." "This is something you'd see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein's Iraq," complained Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell.
Ah, no it's not. You see, State Senator Russell, there's an important difference between the United States and those other countries you mentioned. The United States is a democracy, where people have the right to free speech and where there's a vigorous public debate. In our country, the President speaks and then the rest of us have the opportunity to agree or disagree and discuss or argue about it publicly. It is not at all like a country with a state-run media where The Leader speaks and everyone else is required to parrot the government line.
That is a huge distinction. In an enlightened place of learning, students are given all the information and viewpoints they need and we let them make up their own minds, even if we don't agree with them. If we are truly "indoctrinating" them, we only give them one side of the argument and insist that it's the only that deserves to be listened to. It makes one wonder who's really doing the indoctrinating here.
The funny thing is I don't expect President Obama to say anything remotely controversial. I expect him to welcome students back to school and stress the importance of education and studying hard. As an example, he's probably going to point to his own life to show how a quality education enabled a African-American of modest means and a broken family like himself to eventually become president. If you stay in school and work hard, you can be anything you want to be, too.
Okay, so it's probably not going to be anything historic, but I think it's going to be a positive message for students to hear. If not, we can all start arguing about it when he's done and make up our own minds.