The furor surrounding President Obama’s plans to address the nation’s schoolchildren is “just silly,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday.
Mr. Duncan’s department has taken heat for proposed lesson plans distributed to accompany Tuesday’s speech, and he acknowledged that a section on writing to the president about how students can help him meet education goals was poorly written. It has been changed.
Debate about conservatives’ objections to the speech has dominated cable television and talk radio for several days, signaling again the stark divisions in the country both over politics and social issues.
Some opponents of the speech claim Mr. Obama would try to indoctrinate schoolchildren with what they call his “socialist” agenda.
“That’s just silly. They can go to school. They can not watch. It’s just, you know, going an 18-minute speech,” Mr. Duncan said.
He said Mr. Obama had no intention beyond talking “about personal responsibility and challenging students to take their education very, very seriously.”
Sen. Lamar Alexander, Tennessee Republican and education secretary under President George H.W. Bush, said the president “should be able to address students” while parents and teachers can decide how to handle the speech.
“If I were a teacher, I’d take advantage of it, and I’d put up Lincoln and Eisenhower and Reagan and teach about the presidency, and then I’d put up the head of North Korea and say, ’In that country, you go to jail if you criticize the president. In our country, you have a constitutional right to do it,’” he said.
Mr. Duncan said the guides distributed to schools “were put out by teachers, for teachers. And there is one that wasn’t worded quite correctly. It was talking about helping the president hit his goal of having the highest percent of college graduates by 2020. He’s drawn a line in the sand in that.
“We just clarified that to say write a letter about your own goals and what you’re going to do to achieve those goals. So again, it’s really about personal responsibility and being accountable, setting real goals and having the work ethic to see them through,” the secretary said.
Declaring that viewing the speech is “purely voluntary,” Mr. Duncan said the hubbub is something “I frankly don’t pay any attention to.” Rather, he said, he is focused “laserlike” on the big problems in the U.S. education system.
The secretary said the speech text will be posted on the White House Web site on Monday “and people can have a look. Again, this is all about the president challenging our young people to take responsibility for their education.”
Mr. Duncan spoke on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” and Mr. Alexander appeared on “Fox News Sunday.”
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