Posted by
Code Talker on Monday, September 07, 2009 1:13:09 AM
If your child is to attend the Presidential address i) review the questions earlier w your child, ii) ask to attend as a parent with your child, iii) invite classmates and parents to your home for pizza, popcorn, and discussion.
My opinion: this is a deliberate affront to 9/11, just 3 days later. The President's message will fill the classroom with his pablum, and thereby stifle the national focus on 9/11. My suggestion to the President: cancel his talk due to poor content, impure motive, and bad timing, and then donate the media hookup/time to playing the video records of 9/11, replete with crashes, scenes of our identifiable fellow citizens falling to their deaths and rescuers not escaping, audio of Flight 77. Our school children need to recoil from these horrors. Then lead them in a discussion of the war on terrorism, replete with questions. Again, invite over to your home. Each Dec 7th I review the video record of Pearl Harbor to rekindle and refresh the early scope of the subsequently revealed Japanese savagery.
My further opinion: The released question guide makes no reference to the need of the students to evaluate the presidential performance, privilege, and responsibilities by the constitutional standard. There is no association with foundations - it is all the 'now', and no linkage with the constitutional justification for presidential behavior. Therefore, the presidency becomes a position free floating in the ocean of current crisis and opinion, without a tethering and without anchorage to the constitutional basis for existence.
A closing opinion: Selecting the first part of the school year to have the President address the school youth of our nation may establish a dangerous precedence for future direct communications into the schools. Youth education ought to remain a strictly local activity. The President was not elected by the youth whom he will address. He should address the parents, and then encourage the parents to discuss these issues with their children. The effort to directly address the school youth is not inherently dangerous nor wrong, but when integrated into the many other philosophical positions of this administration, I believe that this administration should be placed on a 'neighborhood watch' program for the safety of our school youth.