What Barack Should Tell the Schoolkids

Here’s what President Obama should tell the schoolkids on Tuesday if he really wants to help solve the problems in American education:

Since I’m supposed to be the leader of this country, I’m gonna give you guys some straight talk. The grown-ups in this country are ruining you kids’ lives. Your teachers have been trained to make sure you don’t learn anything interesting or challenging; half of your teachers should never have been allowed to graduate from grade school themselves. Your parents want you to end up just as stupid and ignorant as they are: they’re really afraid you might actually end up smart, which is why they make fun of smart folks by calling them “nerds.”

So, here’s what you gotta do: fight back! Hard. Force your parents to take you a couple times a week to the biggest library in your town. Go through the books on science and history and math. You’ll find that most of them are just as full of empty words as your schoolbooks. But, if you look carefully, you’ll find a few that tell you the truth. When you find one of those books that tells you the truth, read it, and work hard to understand it.

It’s not gonna be easy, because no one ever taught you to understand books that tell you real stuff. But there are books that tell you the truth about how people create computers and bridges and medicines and airplanes and skyscrapers. The grown-ups don’t want you to learn that stuff, because then you’ll be smarter than most of the grown-ups and then the grown-ups will feel like fools. You just show ‘em.

And you can find books that tell you the truth about all the grown-up leaders, too – how Presidents fought wars for no reason, lied just to keep power, and stole as much money as they could get their hands on. The grown-ups don’t want you to know that either. They want you to grow up to be suckers, just like they have been.

Knowledge is power, guys. You wanna be poor, ignorant fools like your parents, or you wanna fight back?

Your choice.

Good luck

Kids would be pretty startled to hear someone telling them the truth about education for the first time. But they'd listen. And they might even believe him.

Of course, that kind of courage would require that Barack have a backbone. And there is no evidence that he does.