An Inspired Education
by Tony Chavira
John Michlig at the blog Sprawled Out has a great post that asserts some very basic points about the speech President Obama gave to school students this week:
Yesterday the President of the United States gave a speech which he hoped would inspire the youth of America to seize their educational opportunities and aim high.
And who better to look to as an example? You could do much, much worse than to emulate the work ethic and accomplishments of Barack Obama. To have a person of his accomplishment speak to our nation’s youth as a group is precisely the sort of event that has the power to change lives for the better.
How wonderful to have as our president man with the background to credibly say the following:But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school.
There is no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.
No one's written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny.
You make your own future.
That is powerful stuff to hear as a child, especially in the company of your peers - - as a community. It is deeply meaningful to look around yourself and see others like yourself absorbing the same advice from the man holding our nation's highest office.
For schools that took advantage of the opportunity, it was a great success.
When you get right down to it, the current President of the United States is a reflection of the interests of the greater, integrative American community. George W. Bush and his message of “C’s get degrees” was a glimpse into the majority American mindset while he was in office, reckless as it may seem in retrospect (or even at the time). That mindset favored quick decision-making and boorish judgment calls in a time where Americans at large didn’t expect their president to be anything other than an authoritarian emblem of perceived American power. With all due respect to those officials, it served as a lesson both in historical consequence and political temperament that we’re all currently working to adjust (or fight against) in favor of smarter solutions.
President Obama is also a symbolic representative, but one that’s easy to identify with to students who really need an identifiable symbolic leader. To cut the crap, this portion of society is primarily African-American boys, who have a school dropout rate of 52%, compared to 41% percent for African-American females: a discouraging 11-point difference. Many different reasons can be given for this staggering difference between the genders, as well as the telling statistic that, while 78% of white students tend to graduate on average (which should also improve, dammit) while the average for Black students is 55%. No one can deny that a relatable figure of symbolic authority can help to sway the consensus of the masses. Ghengis Khan was a symbol for a downtrodden culture that needed uplifting. So were Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mao Zedong. All great leaders have this power, in their time, and ultimately choose to use it to promote the core values of strong and smart communities. In this case, President Obama is using his position of power to task our children to stay in school, stay focused, and not to let others limit them. But most importantly, he's calling on them to keep from limiting themselves, as downtrodden communities tend to do after being downtrodden for so long. Really, no plans for smart growth can ultimately work unless the community is smart.
Misinformed adults may make questionable decisions, but that doesn’t give our students the excuse to make the same mistakes. Students (and in turn their teachers) have the responsibility to work hard and improve the state of education collectively for the betterment of society as a whole. If that means that our current President has to stand up and give a speech every once in a while to keep the push for strong public education alive, so be it. Ultimately that’s why we elected him: to be a source of symbolic power.
Everything will change though; everything always does. When the hoopla subsides and the dust kicked up by angered parents and political name-callers finally calms, parents will ultimately have two basic choices: either ensure that their child is open-minded and civicly-engaged, or else halt their child’s access from opportunities to make good and informed decisions on their own. Even if you hate everything that President Obama will ever stand for, at the very least you have to give you child enough intellectual credit to make up their own minds about his message. If they’re never allowed to develop their own decisions-making skills how can they ever be expected to balance their credit cards, manage their mortgages or navigate the details of their health insurance packages?
Here. Check it out the speech and make up your own mind about it.
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