No they are not.

School children are traditionally taught to admire the President. Right wingers who continually attack President Obama find themselves in a reverse of their normal position; but, they have no regard for consistency and so find another thing to complain about instead of celebrate.

In particular, this story is about a series of skits done at the school about various holidays and celebrations and the Obama song was the part about Black History Month (President Obama is the first Black President, if you hadn't noticed).

Mind you, it wasn't a very good song; but, it was a lot more appropriate than the song praising Bush that a group of schoolkids sang in 2006 for that President's great work in the Katrina disaster.

I don't believe so. School children are always encouraged to look up to the president, whoever he might be. This is nothing new.

I do think our school children are being indoctrinated, and the idolization of Obama is only a tiny part of the problem. As President of the United States, he should be held in high esteem out of respect for his office, whatever one's personal feeling are about him. What bothers me even more is that our school children are being indoctrinated to "tell someone" if their home life has issues. No one warns the child that when welfare steps in he may be taken away from his home and loved ones and placed in foster care. In my opinion, that can be as damaging to the child as remaining in his own home (unless there is severe physical abuse). Foster children are sometimes neglected and abused, too.

This may be a stretch, but when the government steps into a parenting role and has authority over our children, one might consider that the Hitler Youth started in a similar fashion.

God, I remember wondering this for the last 8.5 years or so. But even then, when I loathed the sitting President, I didn't conclude that students were forced to idolize him.

The President, great or not, is a figure of respect and admiration. Even if you don't like the man (or woman some day?), a healthy respect for the office is always a pretty reasonable goal for school age children. And isn't it nearly every little kid's dream to grow up and be president? Those kinds of dreams and ambitions are wonderful to foster!

Idolizing implies worship, and I haven't heard of any cases whatsoever where he was portrayed as a deity to be worshipped. And you'll never ever catch me saying that ANY president is beyond question.

http://www.eurunion.org/images/POTUS.jpg

There is a marked tendency to idolize our president from some of those who support him, I believe that this unrealistic emotional fixation clouds the reasonable judgment of those affected, making the corrosively coerced praise-a-long shown here seem reasonable, and perhaps even fitting for the honor and celebration of the new-found King of all Hope. This false idolatry is marked and easily identified by the inverse unreasonable utter hatred and complete and total loathing of the former man to hold the same high office. I offer for my case the interview of Newsweek's Editor Evan Thomas on the televised June 5th broadcast of Chris Matthews' "Hardball", where the editor in chief of the Nations premier news magazine was heard to say,
"I mean in a way, Obama’s standing above the country,above – above the world, he’s sort of God, he's.."
Then the normally hard-bitten Matthews replies with a less than hardball,"Yeah"
These are no star struck groupie/wonks enamored over a celebrity politician in a position of high state power, these are people who should know better and who put into peril their professional objectivity, that is if they had any.
Another inexcusable thing about the video above is when the parents of the children voiced objections the school staff blamed the children for writing the lyrics. A patent lie and a disgrace to those entrusted with their care and well being at school. Another creepy note, does not the Mmmm-mmm-mmm! of the lyric chorus suggest the consumption of something utterly delicious? Right from the Campbells soup ad! The school now intends to sue the parent who released the video, for the audacity to reveal what is going on out there, in our schools and to punish through litigation those who dare to disobey

I think that the question at hand mischaracterizes exactly what is the nature of the relationship between childhood indoctrination and the government. You ask if children are being forced to idolize the president, when not only are all presidents generally lifted up and lauded in public education, but governmental authority in general is enforced foremost through the education and indoctrination of students into accepting that authority.

If one traces back the history of U.S. public schools to their inception, you find a historical character by the name of Horace Mann. Mann a political figure from Mass. and the keystone to launching the public school system in the U.S.. Horace Mann and his peers believed wholeheartedly that America's open-threaded school board system of the Jacksonian era (a system mostly controlled by the religious disposition of the area in which the school found itself, as churches at the time were the most prolific source of teachers) should be replaced with the Prussian educational system as described by French philosopher Victor Cousin in his 1833 book Report on the Condition of Public. Essentially this would mean putting schools under state authority so that the compulsory education of the citizens could be dictated from the government level, and therefore foster the development of a moralistic citizenry with uniform, secular values.

To ask if public school students are being forced to idolize Obama is to miss the big picture by a long shot. The public school system as it exists today has one main purpose: to educate compliant and patriotic citizens.

P.S. I find the real horror to be in the continual evolution of control over the student population in general. If my child misses more than 8 days of class in a Semester, I get taken to court. If my daughter wears a long coat, she can be suspended, because the North Clackamas School District feels she might be hiding something. We shouldn't be fearing just the undue respect our children are being fostered into, but the fact that American schools these days seem to be little more than the training ground for the complete dissolution of human self-destination and self-conduct.

Since when can you force kids to do anything?

I can see why "conservatives" are upset with this.....after all, hope, learning, keeping your eyes open and being educated and independent are contrary to their values.

And I'm getting tired of the association with Hitler/Nazism/Hitler youth. Nazism was socialist in name only. It was a RIGHTWING regime based on nationalism. The socialist part of the name was inserted in the beginning to make it more socially acceptable.

Read a book for God's sake......