School

Events

Assisi
Primary

The "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" blog reports that Obama's Indonesian schooling began when he was entered into the Roman Catholic, Franciscus Assisi Primary School, in Jakarta, Indonesia, on January 1, 1968 and sat in class 1B.

He was registered under the name of Barry Soetoro, serial number 203.  The school registration document identifies Barry Soetoro as an Indonesian citizen and his religion was identified as Islam.

Born on August 4, 1961, Obama would have been 7 years and 5 months old. That's late to start school.  Obama will always be 2 years older than his classmates.  I have found no information about previous schooling.

Obama may have started Kindergarten in Hawaii but was whisked off to Indonesia as a result of his mother's second marriage.  There are 5 missing years in Anna's CV between Obama Sr. abandoning the family and her emigration to Indonesia with Lolo.

Obama will complete the first 3 grades at Assisi.

Besuki
Primary

Iis Darmawan, 63, Obama's teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills.  "He wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,'" the teacher said.

His third grade teacher, Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, asked her class to write an essay titled "My dream: What I want to be in the future."  Obama wrote "I want to be a President," she said.

Quranic
Studies

All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school and a young Barry Soetoro, being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school.

He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam.

In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama mentions studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school." 

"In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies."

According to Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers and the principal from 1971 through 1989, Barry actively took part in the Islamic religious lessons during his time at the school.  His teacher was named Maimunah and she lived in the Puncak area, the Cianjur Regency.

"I remembered that he had studied "mengaji" (recitation of the Quran)" Tine said.

Our guy in Jakarta writes: "The actual usage of the word 'mengaji' in Indonesian and Malaysian societies means the study of learning to recite the Quran in the Arabic language rather than the native tongue.  "Mengagi" is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia.  To put it quite simply, 'mengaji classes' are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to.  To put this in a Christian context, this is something above and beyond simply enrolling your child in Sunday school classes."

"The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet."  As Plato said, the images and stories we feed our children affect them for life.

"As I've stated before, the evidence seems to quite clearly show that both Ann Dunham and her husband Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo were in fact devout Muslims themselves and they raised their son as such."

Obama's half-sister, Maya, recalled that the family attended the mosque "for big communal events," and "Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers."

On January 24, 2007, the Obama campaign released the following statement, "To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Then, on March 14th, 2007, the Obama Campaign told the LA Times he wasn’t a "practicing Muslim."

But his official website says:  "Obama Has Never Been A Muslim, And Is a Committed Christian"  (dated: 11/12/2007, and still up as of 5/5/2008)

This is the basic problem with Obama -- his dissimulation -- some would call it outright lying -- but read what his classmates say:

Mates

In 2007, classmate Rony Amiris described young Barry as enjoying football and playing marbles and of being a very devout Muslim.  Amir said, "Barry was previously quite religious in Islam."

"We previously often asked him to the prayer room close to the house.  If he was wearing a sarong he looked funny," said Rony.

Amiris now the manager of the Bank Mandiri, Jakarta, recently said, "Barry was previously quite religious in Islam.  His birth father, Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim economist from Kenya.  Before marrying Ann Dunham, Hussein Obama was married to a woman from Kenya who had seven children.  All the relatives of Barry's father were very devout Muslims"

Rony extrapolates further, that Obama at one point had to change his religion if he ever intended later to run for the office of President of the United States because America would never elect a Muslim to the be President of the United States.

Also in 2007, Emirsyah Satar, CEO of Garuda Indonesia, was quoted as saying, "He (Obama) was often in the prayer room wearing a 'sarong', at that time."

"He was quite religious in Islam but only after marrying Michelle, he changed his religion."

Divorce

When the Soetoros divorced, Anna took Obama to live with her parents, the Dunhams, in Honolulu.  Anna and Obama's half-sister, Maya, returned to Indonesia.

In 1972, the Dunhams enrolled "Barry Obama" in the prestigious Punahou School, starting in the fifth grade.  He attended Punahou on a scholarship.

With more than 3,000 students, Punahou is the largest private school in the country, and it sits on a lush, sprawling campus in Honolulu.  The school is elite and wealthy. 

He made friends quickly and told his classmates that his father was an African prince, the leader of a proud and successful people.

Punahou

The "Choom Gang" is a reference to "chooming," the Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana.

Occidental

Obama writes in "Dreams," that he saw his mentor, the communist Frank Marshall Davis, only a few days before he left for Occidental College, and that Davis seemed as radical as ever.

Davis called college, "An advanced degree in compromise" and warned Obama not to forget his "people" and not to "start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit."

With those words ringing in his head, Obama entered Occidental College in California in 1979, where his freshman roommate was Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who's now a Boston banker.  Also, as a freshman, he quickly became friends with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis.

Obama had an international circle of friends -- "a real eclectic sort of group," says Vinai Thummalapally, who himself came from Hyderabad, India, and who lived with Obama the summer of 1980.

In his first memoir, "Dreams," Obama included a description of black student life at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs," he wrote.  "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."

He added: "To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.  The more politically active black students.  The foreign students.  The Chicanos.  The Marxist professors and structural feminists."

Obama said he and other blacks were careful not to second-guess their own racial identity in front of whites.

"To admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred," he wrote.

You are know by your friends and associates -- and Obama's are the hard-core leftists.

I wonder which face Obama wore to Pakistan -- his Christian face? -- or his Muslim face?

Update:  Hamid nor Chandoo have each contributed the maximum $2,300 to Obama's campaign, and records indicate each has joined an Asian-American council that supports his run for president.  Both also are listed on Obama's campaign Web site as being among his top fundraisers, each bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions from their networks of friends.  Both also attended Obama's wedding in 1992, according to published reports and other friends.

Who?

Obama graduated from Columbia College in 1983, and after spending a year in New York, moved to Chicago.

Many of his classmates don't remember Obama.  He's not in the yearbook.  Columbia couldn't find a picture of him at school.

Harvard
Law

Obama goes to Harvard Law School in 1988.

Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood.

“He then and now is very hard to pin down,” said Kenneth Mack, a classmate and now a professor at the law school, referring to the senator’s on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand style.

Mack added, "Obama stood out from the beginning.  He seemed more mature.  Everyone understood he was a liberal.  He didn't hide that."

Harvard
Law
Review

On February 6th, 1990, Obama became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review -- first Muslim-American too!  The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

He manages to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review without ever publishing a SINGLE piece of written work -- not one!

Update:  Politico claims that an unsigned -- and previously unattributed -- 1990 article was produced by Obama and offers a glimpse at hi's views on abortion policy and the law during his student days, and provides a rare addition to his body of work.

The six-page summary, tucked into the third volume of the year's Harvard Law Review, considers the charged, if peripheral, question of whether fetuses should be able to file lawsuits against their mothers. Obama's answer: No.

I sent Politico an email asking how they knew the document was produced by Obama, since it is "unsigned -- and previously unattributed."  I'll let you know if they respond.

After his appointment, the NY Times carried a story in February 1990, which included a few quotes from Obama:

"The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress," Mr. Obama said today in an interview.  "It's encouraging."  "But it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks.  You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance," he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment...

On his goals in his new post, Mr. Obama said: "I personally am interested in pushing a strong minority perspective.  I'm fairly opinionated about this.  But as president of the law review, I have a limited role as only first among equals."  Therefore, Mr. Obama said, he would concentrate on making the review a "forum for debate," bringing in new writers and pushing for livelier, more accessible writing.

Obama was elected after a meeting of the review's 80 editors that convened Sunday and lasted until early this morning, a participant said.

Until the 1970's the editors were picked on the basis of grades, and the president of the Law Review was the student with the highest academic rank.  Among these were Elliot L. Richardson, the former Attorney General, and Irwin Griswold, a dean of the Harvard Law School and Solicitor General under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

That system came under attack in the 1970's and was replaced by a program in which about half the editors are chosen for their grades and the other half are chosen by fellow students after a special writing competition.  The new system, disputed when it began, was meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review.

And, it worked!

In other words, Obama was the first affirmative action President of the Harvard Law Revue.

The
Plan

Abner Mikva, a five-term congressman from Illinois who was at that time Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit, tried to recruit Obama as a clerk, a position considered a stepping stone to clerking on the Supreme Court, but Obama turned him down.

"He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms," David Axelrod, a longtime friend who is now Obama’s media adviser, said.  "After Harvard, Obama could have done anything he wanted."

The Carl M. Loeb Professor at Harvard University, Laurence H. Tribe, taught Obama and employed him as a research assistant.  He remembers him as a "brilliant, personable, and obviously unique" person.  Tribe said that Obama’s theoretical perspective on applying modern physics to law was "very impressive."

"He is obviously a serious intellectual as well as a fantastic campaigner who can reach across boundaries," Tribe said.  "He will make an extraordinarily fine president."

David B. Wilkins , the Kirkland and Ellis professor of law, said he advised Obama to become a Supreme Court Clerk.  "Obama recognized the honor in pursuing that post," Wilkins said, but quickly added that he wasn’t interested.

“He said that he wanted to write a book about his life and his father, go back to Chicago, get back into the community, and run for office there.  He knew exactly what he wanted and went about getting it done,” Wilkins said.

Obama works hard to dispel the image of having sought his superstar status. "It's not about me, it's about you," he likes to tell his crowds. But according to those who know him, he has been talking about the presidency for more than a decade. "It was clear to me from the day I met him that he was thinking about politics," says Harvard Law School classmate Christine Spurell.

The one thread, that remains consistent, throughout Obama's life, is his teacher's, mentor's and friend's recollection of Obama's single-minded pursuit of high political office.

Juris
Doctor

Obama graduates from Harvard Law School in 1991.  He received his Juris Doctor law degree, magna cum laude.

18 of the original 40 of Barack Obama's classmates gathered around in the schoolyard against a backdrop on the roof that read "Good Luck Barry".