Jesse Walker at Reason Magazine offers some excellent analysis of President Obama's speech to school children.
Q: Why on earth would anyone object to the president's speech to schoolkids today? Do they think he's going to beam subliminal socialist messages into the children's heads?
A: It's a bit more than that. Most of the opposition has centered around the original lesson plan produced by the Department of Education to be used with the speech, with its suggestions that students discuss such questions as "What do you think the President wants us to do?" and "Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?" At one point it asked kids to "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president." You can see how language like that would get people alarmed.
Q: But that's all been shelved now. They've stripped that language out of the lesson plan. It's just a banal little talk about the value of working hard in school. It's the same things past presidents have said to kids, the same things other authority figures tell children all the time. It sounds like the protesters are objecting to the messenger, not the message.
A: The medium is the message. The speech will be a pile of platitudes, not an overtly ideological address. But the exercise itself has ideological undertones, with an implicit lesson that reinforces the bipartisan cult of the presidency. The man in the Oval Office is not supposed to be the nation's chief guidance counselor or its father-in-chief, and it sends a creepy message to act as though he is.
They simply edited the thing on the quick. The only reason for that is the stink that the right raised. Of course, the left and their sycophants at the MSM will say that the right over-reacted over nothing.