We’ve come to a pretty pass when the president of the United States is denounced for asking students to study hard. Sadly, the worst part is that it’s all completely expected. No one bats an eye.

To put it frankly, contemporary Americans generally don’t take kindly to hear public statements about responsibility, nor commitment, and we darn sure don’t want to hear them from those who hold a different political perspective. We have a listening problem. As a result, we’re not surprised when national outcries show the neurons of the public mind are set to send, but not receive.

On the whole, the president’s back-to-school speech on Tuesday was rather innocuous. It merely asked children to work hard, do their homework, pay attention in class, and wash their hands regularly.

This is not to say there weren’t grounds for parents’ concerns—the language used by the Department of Education in the preparatory materials was not the wisest selection—but the speech wasn’t the grand oratory of progressive principles many conservatives feared. And it certainly wasn’t the Democratic equivalent of President Reagan’s 1988 back-to-school speech, which unabashedly preached the virtues of free enterprise, low taxes, and free trade.

President Obama’s speech was roughly equivalent to that of former President George H.W. Bush in 1991. Both speeches focused on themes of personal responsibility and controlling one’s own destiny. Few people seem to remember, however, that immediately after President Bush’s speech was given, a Democrat-controlled Congress ordered a General Accounting Office investigation, convened hearings, and summoned senior Bush officials to Capitol Hill to testify.

And so hyperbolic hullabaloo comes in both red and in blue. Too often, when Republicans speak on themes of responsibility, the Democrats become the free-living party. Too often, when Democrats speak on themes of responsibility, Republicans become the tea party. At some time or another, each party has shirked the obligation of being the party of obligation.

It’s worth noting Democrats and Republicans have different conceptions of how and why Americans should be responsible. And there’s no denying the strong strategic elements of spewing vitriol. But it all goes beyond both differences in philosophy and basic partisan politics. At the core, many Americans nowadays just don’t want to be told they are obligated to do something by different folks with different strokes.

Politics has been like this for probably all my generation’s time. My grandparents fondly tell me of an age when the political climate wasn’t characterized by hysterical soundbite-sized protests and “patriotic” bashing of public officials. Perhaps, once upon a time, such an erudite era did exist. In any case, I can’t speak to that part of the past.

But President Obama can. And he does.

In the pages of his books and along the campaign trail, the president wasn’t shy about saying America is losing something that used to be omnipresent: A sense of mutual responsibility tied to sense of respect for those with a different view of what that mutual responsibility entails.

And yet the president is not a centrist or even necessarily an avid bipartisan. He is someone who displays faith in an old and quickly disappearing idea of the American political tradition: Negotiation on practices isn’t the same thing as selling out on principles, and listening is often more important than shouting. Most of all, he believes that rights comes with responsibilities. In this particular sense, the president is a conservative who reaches back beyond the days of populist conservatism.

And so, ironically enough, a condemnation of the president for speaking about personal and civic responsibility to the nation’s public schools shows that not only do many Americans have problems with messages of responsibility from across the aisle, but also that the president’s message from a begotten time has fallen on many deaf ears.

Obama’s back-to-school speech was given to a future, healthy America from a hale part of the past. The current backlash only shows that the theme of simple responsibility must be emphasized even more.

Today, many Americans don’t want themselves or their children to be asked to do and be more by the president. But almost no one wants to continue to live irresponsibly and endanger the country for our posterity.

At the end of the day, we would all do well to think even more about responsibility and the lessons of commitment our American heritage has given us. We could all be—just a little more old school.


Raúl A. Carrillo ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.