Like many students across the country, I was unable to watch President Obama's speech to students in school yesterday. School districts had many excuses for this, according to the LA Times--from parents complaints to simply not having the technology necessary.

And of course, there were plenty of school districts where it was decided the address didn't fit into the state standards, and that was that. In my AP Biology class, we had already started our first lecture of the year, and there was no way our teacher was going to halt that to watch the president speak.

Naturally, after all the uproar regarding the so-called "socialist indoctrination" that was just bound to be present in the speech, I was disappointed I didn't have a chance to view it and see for myself what the fuss was about.

Luckily, my English teacher gave my class an assignment to read the text of the speech and analyze it. I was all set to speak in glowing terms of the astounding rhetoric which I was sure would be present in the speech, after Obama's previous speech-making triumphs.

Unfortunately, I was pretty underimpressed.

I appreciated Obama's intent and the purpose behind his speech--to encourage kids to take responsibility for their education and stay in school--but I didn't feel particularly inspired at all.

Most of the speech seemed to take on a lecturing tone, as the president echoed the old rules we know by heart--stay in school, do your homework, respect your teacher...the list goes on. Maybe I'm just a cynical high school junior who's not about to drop out of school, but the address didn't really inspire or motivate me.  

Furthermore, telling students that they should set good goals and be more responsible is probably not going to solve the high drop-out rate, low budgets, or any of the many problems that plague public schools. Like a lot of the so-called "solutions to the education crisis," the address was just a temporary band-aid fix that, especially in this case, grossly ignored the root of the problem.

But however condescending I found the speech, I didn't find a hint of "socialist indoctrination" anywhere. Whether or not the speech was effective, it seemed to be on the whole inoffensive. Yet somehow you get parents like this one from Dallas, Texas, who CNN quotes as saying, "The president's speeches tend to be [about] what's wrong with the country and what can we do to fix it. I believe this is the greatest country on Earth, and I try to teach that to my children. ... I don't want them hearing that there's a fundamental flaw with the country and the kids need to go forward to fix it."

I think this proves far more than the speech itself that we really need to ramp up America's educational system.

The full text of the speech is here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/
And you can find out more here: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-schoolkids5-2009sep05,0,2023699.story
And here: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/07/obama.school.speech/