I feel for the parents who don’t want their children in public schools to be “brainwashed” or otherwise exploited by the politician-in-chief, who at least originally planned to give a speech calling on children to support his policies. However, these parents, if they are going to speak out at all, should take the opportunity to oppose the notion of state-supported education on principle. This is because it’s in the nature of a government-funded school system to maintain and expand its power. Remember that public schools as we know them are a government monopoly, just like the government monopoly for medical care now under consideration in Congress. Any learning that takes place in a command-and-control public school system is secondary, and occurs either due to the good intentions of individual teachers, or the recognized need of federal authorities to at least make it look like they’re accomplishing something. But any government system of education is, at the core, corrupt. It is based on force. Children are forced to attend, unless they can find an unlikely and unaffordable alternative elsewhere; and, once forced to attend, they are under the control of government bureaucrats and dictators, who make the rules for the teachers and principals–rules which advance the interests of government, not education. It’s nothing more than educational concentration camp. It’s time for parents to rise up and expose it as such, because it’s their own children who are the most immediate victims. Some self-serving speech given by a President Bush or a President Obama is really the least of these kids’ problems.