22. Stay in School, but Our School

09/08/2009

I want to extend kudos to President Obama for a very eloquent and inspiring speech to students on the importance of setting educational goals and sticking to them. As he stated, not only is it important to their individual career goals, but also to America’s future.

However, I wonder how effective will be the rewards of his motivating message without the serious dedication and continuous direction of the parents or guardians. The challenges of peer pressure towards more and more disruptive and damaging ends remain. It will take a speech a day like this one to steer our youth away from the evils of the world. So, I hope all parents and guardians listened carefully. Unfortunately, the apathy I’ve seen in the last decade would indicate only those already in the choir really, really took the speech to heart. The mass lunacy will continue to target our students, not only directly, but also with its ill- and corruptly-educated young folk, their peers, focusing them on more “fun” and “present-day” vices. Today the message was absorbed; tomorrow when the pill-pushers, tobacco-pushers, sex-pushers, etc. stroll the school halls, we can only hope the parents and guardians have done their job in teaching them morals and self-esteem. Plus, we can only hope that those same parents and guardians don’t get lackadaisical monitoring their students in and out of school. Don’t expect to believe a child will succeed on his own!

So, was this speech necessary? As I commented, yes, every day! The same speech given by someone closer and more meaningful to the child than the president himself might even have been more beneficial. But, what do I know? I’m just a dog who never needed such a speech to motivate me. I have Common Scents. Progress comes with work – it is progress that needs to be measured and it doesn’t end with a checkmark indicating that the president made the speech.

Unfortunately, progress already retreated. I need to verify what I just heard, which is, the vouchers for over 200 children to attend a private school were nullified. The Education Secretary then said it was better to not allow the 1-2% to seek their goals the way they wanted because the dollars would be more beneficial to the 98-99% of the rest of the children who chose to stay in public schools. This is the dumb-down policy. This is again socialistic. My hopes were up, my confidence raised a little by President Obama’s speech. But when the icing is licked off the cake before even gets served, the progress made has already become less sweet.