Hey Obama, Leave Those Kids Alone

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Center for Educational Freedomnmccluskey@cato.org:

It's one thing for a president to encourage all kids to work hard and stay in school – that's a reasonable use of the bully pulpit. It's another thing entirely, however, to have the U.S. Department of Education send detailed instructions to public schools nationwide on how to glorify the president and the presidency, and push them to drive social change. Frighteningly, this is what President Obama has done.

In anticipation of the president's planned September 8 address to students nationwide, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter and detailed "classroom activities" to schools with all sorts of troubling buzzwords and guidance. In his letter, Duncan asserts that the work of educators is "critical to…our social progress." It's a statement that strongly suggests – as many educators have held and continue to hold – that it is the job of public schools to impose values, often collectivist, on students.

The fear that this might be the case is reinforced by classroom activities for pre-K-6 students that encourages children to make posters setting out "community and country" goals. Perhaps even more frightening is the lesson schools are pushed to teach that it is important to listen to "the President and other elected officials." Possibly most distressing of all, though, is guidance that appears explicitly designed to glorify both the presidency and President Obama himself, encouraging schools to prepare for the speech "by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama." And schools are told to ask students how president Obama will "inspire" them in his speech before he gives it, and how they were inspired after Obama has spoken.

This is very disturbing, making crystal clear the huge dangers of government controlling education. Ultimately, politicians will use power over education to indoctrinate children, something completely antithetical to a free society. And this is just the starkest manifestation of the inherent problem with government control of education. Every day free people are pitted against one another in defense of their freedom and basic values because they all have to support a single system of government schools. Evolution vs. creationism. Prayer in school. Books with offensive material in schools libraries. Decisions over whose history will be taught, and whose won't. The curtailment of freedom goes on and on when government takes everyone's money and provides schools with it. Which is why the only system of learning compatible with a truly free society is a system of school choice – public education, not schooling – in which the public assures that all people can access education, but parents are free to choose their children's schools, and educators are free to educate how they wish.

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