By Satvika Ananth
Staff Writer
On Sept. 8, the President of the United States wanted to talk to the children of the country, and people everywhere started throwing fits.
Parents called school districts to demand the live televised version of the speech, being made from a school in Arlington, Vg. not be shown to their children. They went on the Internet, television and radio and insisted that their kids should not be required to watch the speech.
School districts reacted by doing two things. They recorded the speech for later viewing, and gave students the ability to opt out of viewing it.
What is wrong with this picture?
To preface this, I must make it clear that perhaps President Obama giving this speech during the school day wasn’t the greatest idea ever. Perhaps he ought to have waited until the Tuesday evening to talk to students, who would then be with their parents. But regardless, the reactions and actions taken by people were absolutely stunning.
To begin with, it says something about the state of American political factions when people react so violently to this speech. While I’m not saying that all conservatives did this, or that only conservatives were doing this, media attention was indeed focused on the right-winged response.
Even in Coppell, many parents were extremely angry about speech. What were they afraid of? Obama leaking dreadful values into their children’s mind through subversive messaging? A subliminal message from the leftists about healthcare reform?
They seemed to have forgotten that regardless of our president’s political views, he was overwhelmingly elected to be president because the majority of America decided he would be the best next step for our country. And as has already put a great deal of emphasis on the value of education during his campaign, his inauguration and several other occasions, making a speech on the first day of school would be the logical next step in his plan to simply encourage students in America to keep up the good work.
Because that’s exactly what his message was: keep it up, kids. I am thrilled that the president of my country finds my education important enough to take time out of his day to encourage me in my senior year. Though I did not hear the speech at all during my school day, and instead read it online, his words reminded me that I’m not going though the back-to-school blues alone, and that I’m not the only one trying to do something with my life.
Should this message, released to the public before the airing of the speech, be denied to students? More importantly, should students be able to opt out of this? Such a policy is devastating in multiple ways.
By allowing kids to not watch the speech because of personal opinions, and opinions held by their parents, schools are giving students a green light to opt out of future events. This is a precedent that can be used for kids to opt out of science dissections because it makes them queasy, analytical essays because they disagree with the assigned book’s content and group discussions in history class because the topic of the day is economic reform – a hot-button issue.
The workable alternative, which should have been the policy of many schools, is that teachers can opt out of showing the speech, especially in Texas, where school is already underway and class must go on.
If we get upset every time the president of our country wants to send us a message, particularly one that is in no way politically charged, we’ve got a long way to go before we actually understand that freedom of speech goes both ways.
