Full Version: President Bush Speaks in Nashville
President Bush came to my city yesterday. I didn't hear but one side reference to it on the morning of his visit from the traffic guy. (We became used to the highway shutdowns because of VP and Presidential Candidate Gore. Then I got a snow day which turned into nurse daddy day. When I finally put the kids down for a nap I turned off the DVD on our tv and was reminded that Bush was in town because his speech before the National Religious Broadcasters convention at the Grand Ole Opry.
I scrambled to figure out what the NRB meant in the background and was sincerely disappointed to discover its meaning. He ended the speech with strong words defending the American path toward war. But the front part of the message was an appeal to the support of his audience for his faith based initiative program. Because it struck so close to home I was disturbed by the tone of his speech. He struck out at the possibility of doing things with cooperative action of church communities. Part of this was a list of successful incidents of faith based cooperation (oddly excluding Habitat for Humanity of which I am a proud participant even though I am somewhat uncomfortable with its Christian requirements). During his list he highlighted a private school in the same city in which I work as a private school history teacher, an affluent suburb of Nashville named Franklin, Tennessee. He referred to the good work being done at New Hope Academy.
I hoped that I had been wrong about my assumptions of the school. I do not thing such an endeavor is wrongheaded. It is a school that wishes to provide a devout Christian environment in a mixed racial environment. Again, I am uncomfortable with the devout Christian element because of concerns of indoctrinating young children with a zealous Christian faith. (Not the Christianity is zealous, but some Christians are zealous). But in the South any attempt to get young blacks into a private education system seems to be a good option. Here in Nashville many white families that are in the city school zoning district send their children to private schools to avoid the poor educational environment of an overgrown and poorly managed district. This seems to cause further harm to the district and the metro area has something like 100,000 less student in it than it did in 1970 despite the fact that the city has grown significantly.
Anyway, I reserved final judgement in hopes that the rumors I had heard about New Hope were untrue. I polled some senior faculty members and long time Franklin residents today and the response was fairly universal. The general consensus was that the school did an excellent job of providing a 'certain environment' but did not provide an effective education. In fact we had hoped to feed their students into our Upper School when possible, but their students generally could not be accepted into our school at their present grade level.
In the end the anecdotal conclusion from living around the for four years is that it is heavy on religion and very light on education. I find it sad that this is the best example of an alternative example of an educational environment that President Bush could come up with. And the speech confirmed my worst fears about the faith based initiative program that the Administration is going to propose.
Please click on the school and speech cite and sound in on your reaction if you have had the patience to at least skim through this entire post. This is as troubling to me as Bush's choice of speaking venue in the South Carolina primary.
Bob Jones University
I scrambled to figure out what the NRB meant in the background and was sincerely disappointed to discover its meaning. He ended the speech with strong words defending the American path toward war. But the front part of the message was an appeal to the support of his audience for his faith based initiative program. Because it struck so close to home I was disturbed by the tone of his speech. He struck out at the possibility of doing things with cooperative action of church communities. Part of this was a list of successful incidents of faith based cooperation (oddly excluding Habitat for Humanity of which I am a proud participant even though I am somewhat uncomfortable with its Christian requirements). During his list he highlighted a private school in the same city in which I work as a private school history teacher, an affluent suburb of Nashville named Franklin, Tennessee. He referred to the good work being done at New Hope Academy.
I hoped that I had been wrong about my assumptions of the school. I do not thing such an endeavor is wrongheaded. It is a school that wishes to provide a devout Christian environment in a mixed racial environment. Again, I am uncomfortable with the devout Christian element because of concerns of indoctrinating young children with a zealous Christian faith. (Not the Christianity is zealous, but some Christians are zealous). But in the South any attempt to get young blacks into a private education system seems to be a good option. Here in Nashville many white families that are in the city school zoning district send their children to private schools to avoid the poor educational environment of an overgrown and poorly managed district. This seems to cause further harm to the district and the metro area has something like 100,000 less student in it than it did in 1970 despite the fact that the city has grown significantly.
Anyway, I reserved final judgement in hopes that the rumors I had heard about New Hope were untrue. I polled some senior faculty members and long time Franklin residents today and the response was fairly universal. The general consensus was that the school did an excellent job of providing a 'certain environment' but did not provide an effective education. In fact we had hoped to feed their students into our Upper School when possible, but their students generally could not be accepted into our school at their present grade level.
In the end the anecdotal conclusion from living around the for four years is that it is heavy on religion and very light on education. I find it sad that this is the best example of an alternative example of an educational environment that President Bush could come up with. And the speech confirmed my worst fears about the faith based initiative program that the Administration is going to propose.
Please click on the school and speech cite and sound in on your reaction if you have had the patience to at least skim through this entire post. This is as troubling to me as Bush's choice of speaking venue in the South Carolina primary.
Bob Jones University
This is a very interesting story, Eeyore. What would you like us to debate?
How about this. What is Bush trying to accomplish with his faith based initiative? Does he have any chance of realizing his stated goals or perhaps other goals with this proposal?
Eeyore, I think Bush believes that Faith based charities often do a good job when it comes to administering charity programs. THe Nashville Rescue Mission comes to mind..they require a certain degree of accountability when they help people, in so far as getting them to do something to better their situations, instead of just a handout. I do agree that the gov't giving money to religious organizations opens up a whole new can of worms, and I am not sure how to go about it "correctly."
can someone 
please tell me a link to an article or describe what this plan is
please tell me a link to an article or describe what this plan is
Juber
My original post had several links in it. Were you looking for something more?
My original post had several links in it. Were you looking for something more?
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