Recently, the missteps by the White House have been roughly equal to its steps. (I still have visions of Arlen Specter at Town Hall Meetings burned into my mind.) So, what do you do when you have been kicking the can? Well, you fall back on something easy—photo ops with kids. Easy, right? Wrong! Again, this White House exposes its naivety and it hubris by overreaching. They transformed something easy into a disaster. It made me think. What is at the root of the furor around this latest botched event? I am going to start with a presupposition that this opposition on recent missteps like healthcare and the Welcome Back to School Speech is a symptom of some sort of highly organized (Nazi run) conspiracy. (This turning the guns on the people is the worst evidence of pride because it reveals a condescending attitude toward what seems to be a large cross section of the electorate—those people who are the boss of the Chief Executive.)

Anyway, I think that main problem that people have with the Address to the Children is that it is some sort of political indoctrination of the young. After this fervor, you can bet the actual speech will be chock full of completely innocuous pabulum—work hard, get a good job, set goals without any discussion of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. We are sensitive about this, however, because our stomachs turn instinctively when someone tries to reach into the minds of our children and poison them or manipulate them. This should make us sick. But it made me think, what is going to happen in schools on Tuesday when the TV is switched off and the kids go back to work. Is the indoctrination going to stop? Are the little minds going to remain squeaky clean free from influence, wrong thinking and indoctrination? What about when they turn on their cartoons in the afternoon? What about the commercials that enable the cartoons to exist? Maybe you can see where I am going. The indoctrination is going on full-force. It is going on not as a sidebar to the day. It is most kids’ school day. This is why Christian education is so important. It is a God-honoring indoctrination. It is leading young minds in the path of righteousness from which they will not depart.