The President's Speech...lesson ideas

The Empty Right in Washington has chosen to ignore producing actual solutions on everything from the budget to health care, and is instead focusing on their latest fake outrage: the idea that a Democratic President (an African-American one, no less!) would tell students to stay in school. This is certainly more outrageous than President Bush, Sr., already campaigning for re-election, indoctrinating students to support his plan to aimlessly tinker with reform education by sitting them down in front of television screens back in 1991.

Of course, some of the richer conservatives have figured out that the sooner a child drops out of school, the less education s/he has, the more likely they are to vote Republican. So it's in their interest that students not stay in school; indeed some parents are using Obama's speech as a pretext for that effort to dumb down children enough to vote Republican when they are of age by keeping them away from that awful non-white man's plan to tell them not to drop out.

Now, this all surpasses ridiculous, but in an age where these people are not called for their foolishness by the powers that be, educators have to work around them. thus, I would borrow Bush's proclamation on the "controversy" over teaching evolution versus...something baldly unscientific...by "teaching the controversy".

Hopefully all public school teachers will seize this moment to expose students to the public dialogue concerning their education. Democrats in Utah ("a call by our nation’s highest elected official for our children to work hard and live up to their full potential is surely something all of us can agree on regardless of party affiliation") and Republicans in Florida ("President Obama has turned to American's children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American's youngest children") have clearly laid out their cases...why not let students decide for themselves who is right? Or is that the kind of education that Republicans fidn so objectionable?