So, if Obama has his way, he is going to talk to our kids, and by our kids, I mean all of them. Here’s Arne Duncan’s letter to principals.

When I first heard about this story, I thought it was odd but probably ok. But then I read Frederick Hess at the Enterprise Blog who has looked at the suggested teaching materials to go with Obama’s speech:

Things get downright disconcerting when one eyeballs the federally approved lesson plans that the Department of Education has cooked up to support the president’s speech. The preK–6 lesson plans, which were developed with federal funds, devised on taxpayer time, and made available on the Department of Education’s website, exhort teachers to extend the impact of the president’s speech by having students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” This clumsy bit of cheerleading shows no awareness that ”help[ing] the president” might be construed as an invitation to engage in advocacy rather than instruction or that it might worry those who are not Obama partisans. What’s truly remarkable, however, given recent concerns about intrusive federal government this past month, is the lesson plan’s directive that “these [letters] would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”
It all sounds a touch Orwellian, no? “Redistributed” to whom? “Accountable” to whom? Accountable for which “goals” exactly—the ones that involve “helping the president”? I’m sure the intentions behind all of this were decent enough, and that this whole effort was intended as a pep talk dressed up with innocuous materials. The lesson plans were likely drawn up by a couple of low-level staffers and slapped up on the department website without a careful look. But this all points to some of the perils posed by the growing presidential inclination to serve as superintendent-in-chief, and it highlights the kind of hubris that has fueled concerns about the implications of the federal government’s growing reach.

In my book I discuss at some length how progressives, led by John Dewey, have always seen schools as vehicles for promoting statism. Sounds like Obama’s staying true to that vision.

More over at the Gormogons.

Update: Our own Jim Geraghty’s on the case.