Article 4: Growing up Dystopian: The Future History of Education and Childhood

“Race to the Top,” the bundle of reforms implemented by Barack Obama early in his first term, will likely constitute the President’s most important contribution to educational policy. But Obama’s most memorable school-related moment to date occurred on September 8, 2009, when he treated the nation’s school children to a back-to-school speech. The speech itself was mild, its aim benign: the President advised his viewers to study hard and stay in school; he urged his audience to “find an adult you trust –a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor—and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals” (Obama 2009). It was a speech that could have been delivered by any well-meaning celebrity giving encouragement to a room full of youngsters at the beginning of a school year. But the remarkable aspect of the speech laid not its content, but in the controversy that it engendered. The Right painted it as an exercise in indoctrination, an effort to brainwash American students with the purpose of remaking them into radical, socialist, post-colonial revolutionaries. The President’s speech, argued his opponents, signaled the dawn of a new American dystopia.