When does education become indoctrination?

Over the past 20-30 years, we have had our attention drawn to many instances of indoctrination in our school systems across this country. Rather than teaching our children how to think, our public education system has decided that they need to teach our children what to think. This has caused many people to choose alternative methods for their childrens' schooling, whether it be private school, home school, or charter school.

We used to send kids to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. Those things don't matter now, because schools will automatically pass the students now. We now have teachers preaching ideologies in class. They are no longer teaching the basics that we send our kids to school to learn.

The latest example of this indoctrination comes from the B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, NJ. This event reportedly happened towards the end of the 2008-09 school year. The children sang a song about President Obama, praising him for what he is doing to build up the American economy. In excerpts from the article:

• The video shows nearly 20 young children taught a song overflowing with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," repeatedly chanting the president's name and celebrating his accomplishments, including his "great plans" to "make this country's economy No. 1 again.
• The song quotes directly from the spiritual "Jesus Loves the Little Children," though Jesus' name is replaced with Obama's: "He said red, yellow, black or white/All are equal in his sight. Barack Hussein Obama."
• Among other lyrics, touting a fair-pay bill Obama signed in January: "He said we must be clear today/Equal work means equal pay."

I understand the need to teach children to respect authority figures, including the President of the United States, regardless of whether or not you voted for him. However, when a school teaches your children a song about the man and has them sing it in front of others (while recording it for an eventual post on YouTube), then the school has gone beyond education. This is quite simply indoctrination. All this has done is teach the kids to basically worship the President. Apparently, he can do no wrong.

Let's ignore the fact that if the school did this for a Republican, the outcry would be enormous. Lets throw out the fact that many teachers in the public school system are liberal. These facts are quite obvious, so we do not need to touch on them.

In elementary school, children are easily led one way or another. The ability to think in such a critical way has not completely developed, although it is a work in progress. At this level, the parents should be the ones to help the child develop political ideologies, not the schools. In many cases, the schools are doing this in opposition to what the parents are teaching their children. Did the school try to notify parents that they were going to do this? What was the goal of this exercise?

Now, what would have happened if the school had asked the children to learn a song about Jesus and sing it in front of the school? I think we all know the answer to that.