The Barack to School Speech
Here is US President Barack Obama’s speech to the students on the first day of school. It’s a great speech—not for the grandeur of the oratory but its exact opposite. The speech is down-to-earth, couched in simple but effective language, and amply illustrated with examples from the speaker’s own life. Unlike many politicians, you can believe that this one had a real, ordinary childhood.
Best of all, Obama talks to the kids as if they were intelligent human beings. As one who was talked down to by many pompous adults in the course of her schooling, I can tell you that this approach is highly appreciated.
I wish someone had spoken to me like this when I was a kid. Which reminds me that there are millions of schoolchildren right here who need this kind of encouragement and inspiration and are not getting it. It’s tougher on them. This is not America.
For our second LitWit challenge, I want you to write me your back-to-school speech for Filipino schoolchildren. You are the President and it is your job to inspire the children in these troubled times. (I wonder if there is any age in history that did not consider itself a troubled time.) Tell them why education is important and why they should study hard even if it often seems pointless.
Remember: simple, effective language. At the first hint of pompousness you’re out. 500-word maximum—the word count will be enforced this time. Entries will be accepted until 11:59 pm on Thursday, September 17, 2009.
The winner will receive this: a set of Nancy Drew books, hardcover, mysteries number 59 to 62. It’s our tribute to US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Nancy Drew fan. Read them yourself, or give them to a kid. Get to work. The weekly JessicaRulesTheUniverse LitWit Challenge is brought to you by National Bookstore.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
September 12th, 2009 at 07:51
That speech was at the forefront of controversy out here only because *some parents* thought their kids were going to be indoctrinated with some socialist/communist propaganda. Of course, these may also have been the same people who thought that Obama never was a US citizen and that his health care reform package contained clauses about death camps for the elderly.
It’s so frustrating to think that someone who’s so reform-minded gets sabotaged at every turn by fear-mongering opportunists who pull the puppet strings of the uninformed in the US. Case in point again would be his key note speech to the opening of the new session year of The House. Instead of focusing on the substance of the president’s speech, the media chose to dwell on some piss ant Republican who broke into hysterics in the middle of the delivery.
September 13th, 2009 at 09:48
Volume-addict, exactemum. I was gonna write almost exactly the same things.
I’d just like to add that these ridiculous protests (i.e. charges of socialism, Nazism, non-US-citizenship, use of tax dollars for illegal immigrants – in fact Obama wasn’t lying, death panels, revenge for all the injustices made against blacks, “indoctrination” with a proposed essay question for schoolkids on how they can help the president, etc.), not to mention caricatures of Obama being a monkey eating a banana, are not just, as one CNN commentator put it, “opposition just for the sake of opposition”, but rather thinly veiled racism and xenophobia. All the anger and vitriol just doesn’t seem congruent with the discussion on health care, no matter how contentious it is. There is something else to this anger: They just realized it wasn’t a dream; somebody different from them and from supposedly the most inferior of all the races (His father wasn’t only from Kenya, he was actually born there…eeewww!) is ACTUALLY in the White House proposing bills that are going to affect them.