Santorum flunks the history of home-schooling
The poorly educated candidate says U.S. presidents taught their kids at home for 150 years. He’s wrong
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If Rick Santorum had been a better history student, he would know that presidents spent the first two centuries of American history working to support the education system he now wishes they disliked. Take Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia and patron saint of today’s small government conservatives: He consistently expounded the virtues of public education. In his 1779 Virginia “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson argued that without public schools, only the rich would be educated, leaving poor but potentially productive citizens unable to participate effectively in the democracy. “It is better that such should be sought for,” Jefferson wrote, “and educated at the common expence of all.”
In light of his comments Friday that President Obama wants to send students to college in order to “indoctrinate” them with a secular worldview, Rick Santorum might be especially chagrined to learn that in the Elementary School Act Jefferson proposed in 1817, he insisted that “no religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practised.” Similarly, in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson advocated for teaching “the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history” instead of the Bible. The point is, the American president who most eloquently promoted public education did so specifically, in part, to try to prevent the religious fundamentalists of his day from being able to use schools to indoctrinate children with religious beliefs.
