Because who could object to Obama’s message for our kids?
…at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.
Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.
That evil commie is going to brainwash our kids into thinking they can succeed!
See the complete, completely innocuous text below:
Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama
Back to School Event
Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009
The President: Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.
I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.
I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.
Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”
So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.
Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.
I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.
I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.
I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.
But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.
Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.
Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.
And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.
And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.
We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.
Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.
I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.
So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.
But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.
Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.
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 – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s 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. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.
That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.
Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.
I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.
And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.
Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.
That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.
Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.
That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.
No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.
And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.
It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?
Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.
Too bad the Democrat party in Minnesota is busy trying to cut education funding to support the welfare state.
http://www.startribune.com/politics/state/41156942.html
Every sector of the state takes a hit when you have massive budget deficit. Pity we can’t simply ignore deficit spending, like Cheney/Bush did for 8 years.
Too bad the so-called Governor of this state will not raise taxes to provide a reasonable revenue stream to meet state needs.
Oh, excuse me, you must belong to the “cut someone else’s program” faction.
Because it is such a wonderful economy for a state to raise the tax on its citizens.
As opposed to raising them on non-citizens? GOod luck with that.
Seriously: Someone has to pay the bills, and it is better than kicking that job down the road for future generations to pay.
The proper functions and level of services provided by a government may be a matter of legitimate dispute, but the fact remains that, however little or much the government does, it’s going to cost money. The public has been told for years that we can have lower taxes and all the nice programs we want. Unfortunately, the public has bought into it (look at California). It’s a question of setting priorities, and acting like adults even when it’s no fun anymore.
I’m not advocating paying no taxes as your argument seems to assume. I’m simply saying that if it was costing the government, say, 20% of our nation’s GDP to fund government in 1990, 1995, and 2000, then why do we suddenly need 22% of the GDP to fund government today.
I know prices increase, but so does GDP. I know we need to invest in things, but we were investing back then.
I hear alot of arguments on why we need to spend more $$ of on government. Often times, I agree. I rarely,though, hear a compelling argument on why, going forward, we need to allocate a higher proportion of our nation’s earnings toward government.
Absolute dollars vs. proportion of our GDP. Huge difference. Huge.
“why do we suddenly need 22% of the GDP to fund government today.”
That would be interest on the massive debt that Bush (both, and Reagan) incurred.
Bravo, sir.
The percentage of GDP also increases because the public demands/expects more from government.
My point on raising taxes was directed at Pawlentynomics (although much the same could be said about Reaganist budgeting). In order to fund its expenditures, the state could either raise taxes — unacceptable to many — or cut expenditures still further — also unacceptable. The easy, happy-talk way out is to defer paying this year, and letting the next crowd worry about it. There are three alternatives the state could have followed: two were painful, one was foolish. Unfortunately, we got door number three and as Timmy rides off into the sunset, we’re stuck with the bills.
Oh Yaz, very clever. That article was from March.
But back on topic, both President Reagen and H.W. Bush gave speeches to American schools; this is nothing new. We are dealing with a group of people that would criticize the President if claimed “apple pie is delicious” as a fascist message against cherry pie.
So here’s the deal from my perspective.
1. Obama is not trusted by conservatives.
2. Obama’s office says he is going to give a speech to students, but no specifics yet.
3. Someone leaks message that Obama asks the kids to write a letter about what they can do to help him (not our country, but the president). At least this is how it is reported…
** At this point, some worry about their kids starting to write letters talking about passing medical legislation (or whatever his agenda is)… see point #1.
4. Text related to step 3 is dropped before the text of the speech is released to the public.
So this post is written after step 4, but before conservatives can react to the actual speech text.
Conservatives are left to wonder what the text looked like before they freaked out and Obama modifies his message.
Now if there was only a conservative leader (that also receives press coverage) that at the point of #3 says… “OK Mr. President. We are with you. What are you going to say to our kids exactly?” Meaning skip the whole freak out part.
That’s a great speech but the outrage wasn’t about the speech it was about the lesson plan released in advance of it.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10582301/President-Obama’s-Address-to-Students-Across-America-September-8-2009
Just because the President is the whole country’s President doesn’t mean the president’s idealogy is the whole country’s idealogy. As hard as this will be to grasp for many on the left, the original lesson plan was seen by many as extremely ideological and therefore inappropriate for the classroom.
And just because an education department releases some document doesn’t mean that President Obama had anything to with it nor does it mean that eery school teacher is going to use that document. Usually these suggested lesson plans are just that ideas for teachers to use or not as a part of an activity. It is the personal responsibility of parents to teach their children how to take information in and decide how to react to it.
Bluntly the Republicans and Conservatives just shot themselves in the foot and no amount of spin is going to change the fact that they don’t care what Obama does… they are against it. The righting has been crying wolf so long that nothing they say has any meaning any more.
Riiiiiiiight, it was the “lesson plan.” Except that the language used to criticize the “lesson plan” is the EXACT same language used to criticize virtually EVERY OTHER ASPECT of the President’s actions since his inauguration.
Revisionist Yahoo Lloyd’s at it again.
WHy don’t you just own up to the fact that your party is the party of hysterical kooks?
So you’re not denying that the lesson plan distributed by the US Department of Education was ideological. Well, at least you have enough intellectual honesty for that.
Um, did you even read our responses?
Lloyd, which GOP’er leader was responsible, (not a word often associated with right-tweakers) for the opposition response? You know, the “you don’t need to work hard and stay in school” message. George W Bush could be the poster child for that movement.
Actually Lloyd the lesson plan you pointed to was never officially released by the Department of Education. It was a draft that the Right Wing went crazy with… I know you anger junkies need to use anything you can to get your fix but try to keep to the facts. I know that is hard for Republicans but hey this site will hold you to it.
I don’t know why amusinc is so surprised. The GOP is the anti-stay-in-school, anti-work-hard party. And it shows
Amuseinc gets some points for honesty as well. Yes, it was a draft in that it was sent out to the schools protested and only then revised.
Again, you’re not denying its idealogical bent, you’re simply protesting the protests against it. That’s fine, but don’t accuse me of dishonesty when I tell you a.) that the speech was a good one, but b.) given the materials that the Department of Education circulated prior to that good speech, it’s clear that the administration viewed the speech as a political opportunity.
Sorry, but your smug adherence to your talking points just makes you seem all the more ignorant as the facts are laid before you. It’s like the time you guys were trying to string up a congressman for saying he doesn’t have to read a bill he knows he’ll be voting against while you were defending a guy that says there isn’t any point to reading any bill, let alone the ones he’s voting for.(http://mnpublius.com/2009/08/republicans-dont-even-care-whats-in-health-bill-theyll-vote-against-it-no-matter-what/) You don’t care about the facts, you care about the narrative and the fact is Obama’s department of education overstepped and anyone with an ounce of credibility and half a brain admits it. So which is it that you’re lacking?
I think raising taxes is the answer, regardless of what the question is.
Chickenshit. Can’t own up to your side’s craziness, eh?
Is repeating a major part of it owning up to it?
No stupid, if you cut tax rates when the economy is humming along and you have surpluses thanks to Ventura, Pawlenty and Sviggum; and then refuse to adjust them when the economy slows and you have deficits you’re just plain stupid. Just what ARE you willing to pay for? Do you want roads, sewer, clean water, Police and Fire, how about national defense, public schools, subsidized higher education or should college be just for the rich?
Lets raise taxes more.
Perhaps we should go deeper into debt?
Or perhaps a tactic of increasing revenue, and decreasing expenditures.
Well, that would be a democratic tactic, wouldn’t it?
You’re such a good little party foot soldier.
“party footsoldier”
Not really. I simply am able to recognize which party most typically acts in the best interest of most Americans/Minnesotans. I’m not an advocate of voting against one’s best interests.
Time for your six month old strib link. You’re slipping.
JH, you’re so predictable it’s boring. Just trying to push buttons, eh? Can’t face the truth, eh?