Salon: Santorum flunks the history of home-schooling

[highplainsdem]

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/25/santorum_flunks_the_history_of_home_schooling/singleton/

The fraudulence of almost every single one of these claims makes Santorum himself a cautionary example of the failures of the American education system. (One wishes that as a former U.S senator, Santorum would at least know that state and local boards of education, not the federal government, run public schools.) Santorum makes up facts, misunderstands education in early America, and manages to invoke the legacies of both racists and secularists, neither of which, I assume, he wants to claim as his forebearers. The solution to our education crisis must not be to withdraw public interest and investment from education, leaving people like Santorum to pass on these misunderstandings to another generation.

-snip-

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.

-snip-

There are, no doubt, terrible problems with American education today, and we need big ideas. But those ideas shouldn’t be drawn from an ignorant, if not dishonest, view of the past that imagines presidential home-schooling or a pre-industrial golden age. From Jefferson to Horace Mann to “Freedom’s Teacher” Septima Clark, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to the GI Bill, there is plenty in our real past to inspire us to action today. But getting himself tangled up with the legacy of George Wallace, Rick Santorum has gotten himself on the wrong side of history.

[Historic NY]

1. My town had it own public school in 1750........

championed by none other than James Clinton & George Clinton......whose son & nephew Dewitt established the New York Public School System

[Scuba]

2. When our public institutions are broken, we should fix them, not give them to corrupt capitalists.