At noon Eastern time today, President Obama will deliver a speech to America’s schoolchildren on what, for most, is their first day of classes. Many of them won’t be watching, however. Parents across the country are pressuring schools not to show the speech — or even keeping their kids home.
Is the president’s speech part of a sinister plan to create a socialist Obama Youth movement? Hardly. The transcript, released yesterday, reveals a pretty standard homily to educational excellence, and there’s no evidence it was ever supposed to be anything else. Even so, there’s something grotesquely collectivist about the idea of the president addressing a captive audience of 50 million schoolchildren, hectoring them to turn off the X-Box and hit the books.
