Why the uproar on Obama speaking to our children?

I find the hoop-de-do over President Obama’s speech to our country’s schoolchildren even more amazing to the presumptuousness of the White House decision to interrupt what for many is the usually chaotic enough already first day of school at what is lunch time in much of the country.

I have vague memories of hearing President Eisenhower when I was a child in grade school. My memory says it was during the national hysteria that we weren’t teaching our children enough science which came after the Soviet Union had launched the first. My memory is of a radio being brought into our classroom and a speech coming over WSUI radio [University of Iowa radio] from Iowa City. Because we would have been listening to a single house-sized radio with the limited sound projection that three- or four-inch speakers provided over a low-power station in the next county and having to hear it over whatever sounds even an attentive audience of thirty or so would have been making I don’t remember hearing much, but I think all the leader of the free world was saying was that America’s children needed to study more because the other country’s children were. It probably took no more than ten or fifteen minutes.

This might not have been a national address and it may not have been especially aimed at children, but I don’t remember hearing of any parents or politicians objecting. And, since I had not even thought about this for half a century, I may be a bit off on what I remember.

Followup on the Obama school name choice

As most probably know and as I alluded to in a post about Tom Conlon two days ago, our school board has decided to unnamed the school at 707 Holly from Daniel Webster and name it after Barack and Michelle Obama.

I suggested a more cautious approach for the renaming earlier. Somebody has contacted me offline to suggest that I missed an important point that renamings generally ignore:

Once you name something after someone[s] you make it more unlikely that something else will be named for him/her/them.

The President and First Lady now will have a school named for them. There is a chance that in a decade or so, when they might otherwise have been in a position to have something better named for them and that they won’t be in the running for that honor.

And, now that the District is in an unnaming mood, what school might be next? Daniel Webster was not a perfect person, but there are schools in our city named after much less deserving people. Andrew Jackson was a slave owner who relocated and slaughtered native Americans. Yet we have a school in Frogtown [with high populations of both of these minority groups] which has been carrying his name for generations. And maybe Warren Harding warrants a school, but a major high school??

School board members work hard for little pay. They are responsible for large budgets for which funding sources often give them little leeway in how they are spent. They have no independent staff to give them the answers to the questions they feel they need. I do not wish to make their work any harder, but maybe they really should start looking at what else needs to be unnamed now.

Tom Conlon is leaving

We elect Republicans in our city quite often. However, we seldom elect somebody who admits to being one.

Tom Conlon was the exception, having fallen heir to Eleanor Weber as holding the only school board seat that the DFL could not take. [Greg Felice was in there too, but that situation is a bit more complicated and did not last.]

Now it has been revealed that, as part of a move to North Carolina, he will be leaving the board.

Sooner or later we will see posters in various fora suggesting that we are closer to one-party rule locally.

Maybe so. However, I suspect that we won’t see a lot of difference. Aside from the fact that local issues are so often non-partisan [as we have been reminded before there really is not much difference between DFL and GOP pot holes] we still seem to find things on which to differ.

As for Tom Conlon: It may well be that he will be remembered for his last dissenting vote, the vote against taking Daniel Webster’s name off of a school and replacing it with Barack and Michelle Obama’s. That decision was certainly defensible even with the partisan element removed. Naming public institutions and places after living people has its problems. There are people who even now have diplomas certifying graduation from Richard Nixon High Schools.

UPDATE: [5/23/09] Yesterday's DPP carried a side bar which noted the times and place of Tom Conlon farewells and suggested a memory book is being compiled.and that people with memories should send them to an Edina address. Somehow that Edina address seems to be saying a lot.