Last week, Webster School in Saint Paul voted to change its name to “Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School”.
Do I roll my eyes and shake my head when my local school district subscribes to a personality cult for a president that’s been in office just a skosh over three months? Of course. Indeed, it strikes me as the kind of second-hand hubris (I don’t know a better term for “participating in others’ hubris”) that I can see people looking back on in, say, five years, shaking their heads, and saying “well, maybe we were a bit rash…”
But the real problem is Ain this thread, on E-“Democracy’s” Saint Paul forum. Saint Paul school board member Ann Carroll chimes in later in the conversation:
Now just hold on here a minute! Some of the posts on this topic are veering
way too close to racist comments, which is not tolerated on either this
Issues Forum or by SPPS.
“Racist comments?”
Read the thread. Before Carroll chimed in, one commenter (Gary Fishbach, friend of this blog and a noted Highland Park Republican) dropped a couple of pleas for fiscal sanity. A couple of DFLers responded.
And then Carroll cried “Racism”.
You’ll examine the thread, as I did, in vain for the faintest sign of racism…
…unless you believe, as Carroll seems to, that criticizing the name change, for any reason, is itself racist.
I’ll be asking Ann Carroll for comment.
The name change is just plain dumb – although not, perhaps, as disturbing as the curriculum change. “Service Learning” is education establishment shorthand for “shanghaiing students into serving as free labor for non-profits”. Like so much that passes for normal in the Saint Paul and Minneapolis public schools, it’s got very little to do with education, but much with paying chits to the educational establishment’s supporters, and making sure future generations get healthy doses of koolaid at an early age.
If I speak out against a guy raised on the beaches of Hawaii by his lilly white bank president grandmother, then call me racist.
May 19, the School Board meets to put their “blessing” on the school named for the secular savior.
They must have money laying around for this sorta stuff. Not that they already are closing 2 schools and will have to pay for a new superintendant search.
If it feels good, that’s all that matters.
I was both wondering what the hell “service learning” meant, and dreading finding out. Aren’t we supposed to be against child labor?
When ever one of Anne Carroll’s vestigal brain synapse fire unexpectedly, it’s always an occaision for hilarity….I often wonder if her eyes start fluttering wildly just prior to an eruption of inane babble.
Bob “make mine grape” Spaulding, injected race into the discussion, not Gary. Racism was, of course, inevitable, since the party of Scrubs depends on maintaining a de facto plantation system to keep itself in power.
Speaking of the Democrat plantation, am I the only one that didn’t miss the irony of rushing to rename a school to “honor” a man’s race in a district that puts thousands of black kids out on the streets to face the future of a functional illiterate in order to protect a status quo that benefits an overwhelmingly white leftist trade labor union?
am I the only one that didn’t miss the irony
Nope!
Swiftee…..you must be refering to the case of the DC school vouchers. Barry killed the DC school voucher program (with zero “science” eveidence of any failures of it), forcing two young African-American girls out of his daughters private school, and into a war-zone DC public school. The man has a heart of ice.
Can these people at least wait until the man’s out of office? The tradition, as far as I can recall, is that you name a public building after a citizen has passed on. Otherwise, you run the risk of honoring a person who may dishonor himself or others in the meanwhile, and more importantly, it is in fact a non-monetary payoff.
These people have the whirleys.
How convenient it must be to label your political opponents as racists without a shred of evidence. *looks over at angryclown*
I was also curious what service learning meant, and why it would be included so clumsily in a school name.
I applaud the encouragement to participate in community service, either long term or short term (much like you Mitch encouraged people – presumably including students who were old enough – to volunteer for sandbagging during the flooding). It encourages a sense of belonging, benefits the community, and it can when done well reduce vandalism and increase a sense of pride in where one lives. It can even provide some practical educational experience.
But to insert it to this extent into an educational organization whose primary task should be academic is more questionable certainly. Is this service for credit? Is it like students being released to gain work experience with a for-profit business, for credit? Those students were paid usually, but not always, back when I was in school.
My younger son went to Webster for just one year, in kindergarten. At a parents’ night one evening, we were walking from the kindergarten -3rd grade wing to the older classes’ wing, and we had to pass thru a hallway with all sorts of pictures of women and minorities who had made a difference in the world. We saw Hillary, Ghandi, Malcolm X, all sorts of liberal activists and politicians. (Oh, we saw Martin Luther King Jr, but I’ll bet they didn’t realize at the time that he was actually a Repblican!). Not one conservative minority was there. No Condoleeza Rice, no Elaine Chao, who was the Secy of Labor at the time, no Carol Molnau (only the Lt Governor of the State); well, you get the idea. At that point in time, I decided we were either moving to the only school in St Paul I’d want my kids to attend, or getting out of St. Paul altogether. If my son is surrounded by faculty and staff who don’t honor minorities and women who are conservatives, then why should he feel welcomed in their school?
And why should that school get my tax dollars? His parents are conservatives in St. Paul. Isn’t that minority status? So it doesn’t surprise me at all they’re changing the name. I hope parents who disagree with the name change will transfer out and put their tax dollars somewhere that doesn’t waste precious money to change a school name for no reason whatsoever.
“I was also curious what service learning meant, and why it would be included so clumsily in a school name.”
Dude, we’re talking about a crew that renamed the Department of Education, the Department of Children Families and Learning.
No, don’t think about it too long, you’ll get brain freeze.
Racist is whatever Anne Carroll and Chris Stewart says is racist.
Man, would I pay to see the two of them fight over the last doughnut.
“Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School” is too long a name for children to remember, why not shorten it to something a little more manageable, like “Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary School”?