Rick Santorum’s home-school hokum

from Salon

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is probably “the most prominent home-schooler in America.” Indeed, the fact that Santorum’s seven kids have largely been educated at home (two of them are now adults) is a key aspect of Santorum’s appeal to his right-wing base. Of course, home-schooling is a popular issue in its own right, especially among religious conservatives, but its symbolic importance goes much deeper than that. It also symbolizes Santorum’s self-presentation as a man of firm principles and unbending anti-government convictions, in obvious contrast to some flip-floppy, Obamacare-loving, one-time Northeastern governor one might mention.

As a home-schooling parent on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Santorum, I’ve observed his emergence — and, to a lesser extent, that of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow — with a certain queasy fascination. It’s difficult to imagine a hypothetical universe where I’d ever vote for Santorum for anything, but sometimes his rhetoric on home-schooling strikes one of those weird political nerves where the quasi-libertarian right and the quasi-anarchist left hold similar views. In a recent Ohio speech, for instance, Santorum described the predominant model of public education as an artifact of the Industrial Revolution that has become ill-suited to a post-industrial age: “People came off the farms where they did home-school or had a little neighborhood school, and into these big factories … called public schools.”
Read the rest here