- Home
- News Grid
- Local News
- Green Hawk
- Politics
- School Zone
- Youth Camps
- Nonprofits
- Missing Pets
- Multimedia
- Arts
- Movies
- Outdoors
- Sports
- News Releases
- Columnists
- Blogs
- Opinions
- Classifieds
- Advertise
- Donate
- Partners
Michelle Malkin: Why Parents Don’t Trust the Educator-in-Chief
They think we’re crazy. “They” are the sneering defenders of President Barack Obama who can’t fathom the backlash against his nationwide speech to schoolchildren Tuesday. “We” are parents with eyes wide open to the potential for politicized abuse in America’s classrooms.
Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered last week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama. In the clip, a parade of entertainers vow to flush their toilets less, buy hybrid vehicles, end poverty and world hunger, and commit to “service” for “change.” Actress Demi Moore leads the glitterati in a collective promise “to be a servant to our president.” Musician Anthony Kiedis pledges “to be of service to Barack Obama.”
The campaign commercial crescendos with the stars and starlets asking their audience: “What’s your pledge?”
This same “Do Something” ethos infected the Education Department teachers guides accompanying the announcement of Obama’s speech — until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to “help the president.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country — circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts.
O’s bureaucrats can whitewash offending language from Tuesday’s speech-related documents, but they can’t remove the taint of left-wing radicalism that informs Obama and his education mentors. A spokesman maintained that the speech is “about the value of education and the importance of staying in school as part of his effort to dramatically cut the dropout rate.” But the historical subtext is far less innocent.
Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare-rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky — a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.
As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called “small schools movement” to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of “inequity, war and violence.”
A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The “change” agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama — and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.
Ayers preached his education-as-“social justice” agenda to his “comrades” at the World Education Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, three years ago:
“This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President (Hugo) Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle — I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”
Ayers continued:
“I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position — and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: You can change your life — whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: We must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!”
This is why informed parents do not trust the educator-in-chief and his “comrades.” You can take Obama from the radicals in Chicago. But you can’t take the Chicago radicalism out of Obama.
— Michelle Malkin is author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. Click here for more information. She can be contacted at malkinblog@gmail.com.
» wrote on 09.07.09 @ 07:59 AM
Cancelling my subscription to Noozhawk. Michelle Malikin is too loosely bound to me in my face in the morning. If I want to see her, I know where to find her. Good-bye, Nooz…
» wrote on 09.07.09 @ 08:20 AM
Michelle, try to separate reality from fiction.
» wrote on 09.07.09 @ 08:54 AM
Surely there must be a more intelligent, less shrill right wing columnist than Ms. Malkin. Her hate-filled and toxic rantings are converting no one to your side of the aisle, I can assure you.
When the Virginian-Pilot newspaper dropped her syndicated column in 2004 one of the paper’s writers noted that Malkin “habitually mistakes shrill for thought-provoking and substitutes screaming for discussion,” that she represents “the worst of what’s wrong with punditry today,” and that she “adds absolutely nothing to genuine political discourse.”
I couldn’t agree more.
» wrote on 09.07.09 @ 09:29 AM
It is a sad day in America when people put politics ahead of what is right. The President is merely trying to communicate to students to work hard, stay in school and take personal responsbility. It is funny how the right had no problem when George H. Bush and Reagan did the same thing. If you are still paranoid go to WhiteHouse.gov and read the speech for yourself. It is only positive and constructive. Michelle is a right wing nut and will find fault in everything Obama does.
» wrote on 09.07.09 @ 10:31 AM
Funny how the Malkin haters are always the first to spew their venom. For a bunch of losers who hate hearing anything that challenges their distorted view of the world they can’t help but suck it in anyway.
» wrote on 09.07.09 @ 10:23 PM
...school children pledged allegiance to the flag, of the United states of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, Under God, Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Now we want them to pledge allegiance to me Barrack Obama, and to the agenda for which I promote, one world, abandon God and worship me, as I take liberty and justice from all..
Now our schools have guns and drugs, after they kicked God out.
Does anyone else see what’s happening here?
» wrote on 09.07.09 @ 10:25 PM
by attacking the messenger instead of the message?
» wrote on 09.08.09 @ 05:58 AM
who supports Obama’s efforts.
I think trying to end world hunger is a good thing.
I also think Obama will influence an awful lot of kids who’d otherwise join gangs and drift into crime to work hard at school.
Hard to see how anyone could oppose that.
» wrote on 09.08.09 @ 08:43 AM
Obama is going to end world hunger by beaming himself into the schools like Chairman Mao? That’s a stretch…
» wrote on 09.09.09 @ 03:19 PM
A presidential call to begin the school year with hard work, confidence, an open mind, a willingness to help make the world better, is controversial? To whom?
Almost every president issues such a proclamation. GW did. So did GHWB, his dad.
What’s the big deal?
Malkin has a right to her opinion. It’s just that (unlike a George Will or David Brooks) I rarely understand what hers is, or where it comes from. Except, maybe, watching too much Fox-TV.
There seems to be some kind of mindless full court press from self-proclaimed
“conservatives” to attack, challenge, sow doubt, on everything the new president is
doing, large or small.
Maybe that’s what minority party politics, when you have few leaders and fewer ideas, is about - make the other guys seem as lame as you are.
But trying to submarine a message to school kids to dream big, study hard, never
give up, and avoid spreading the flu? That’s really getting into small-ball.
Malkin and her friends should consider the Aesop’s fable about “The Boy Who Cried,
Wolf!”
By complaining constantly, pettily, about everything, big and little, some day she may find that Obama is about to really screw up, big-time, and no one will listen to her because everyone has tuned her and her negativity out. Is that what she wants?
More Local News »
Michelle Malkin: Speaker Pelosi’s Deficient Cleaning Service
Her House is in disarray as she tries to sweep Massa cover-up allegations under the rug
Michelle Malkin: The Obama Way — Bluster, Bully, Bribe
Accusations of a judgeship-for-Obamacare-vote deal not so far-fetched
Michelle Malkin: Oba-Kabuki Health Care a Box Office Bomb
Obamacare Theater, lacking substance, showed only that Democrats have a flair for the dramatic
Michelle Malkin: It’s All the Tea Party’s Fault
For the left, all the evil in America can be conveniently placed right where it doesn't belong
Michelle Malkin: Jack Murtha — Requiem for a Corruptocrat
The late Democratic congressman embodied everything that is wrong with Washington
Weather: A Few Clouds 56.0º
Search Noozhawk »
