Semi-grammatical Santorum attacks public education

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Rick Santorum home schools his children. That way they get the full benefit of his mastery of calculus and physics, plus his incisive understanding of history. Speaking in Ohio on Saturday, Santorum explained that public schools are “anachronistic,” having been developed in tandem with the factory system during the American industrial revolution as a means to educate workers. We’re going to ignore the problems with that thesis to consider Santorum’s argument against public schooling, which went like this:

Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.

I’m going to call that an argument in favor of public schools, for several reasons.

Let us stop picturing Rick Santorum as a bidder for the admiration of the crowd a moment and instead consider him in his role as the primary educator of his children. As one English teacher evaluating another, I can say that the sentence, Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? does not meet the standards of our vocation. First of all, the answer to that question is “1821 Boston.” Second, Santorum can be forgiven for omitting the words with the idea that after where did they come up, as he was speaking publicly and semi-extemporaneously.

Less forgivable is his bad subject-verb agreement between public education and bigger education bureaucracies and was the rule in America. You would think that a candidate for the presidency would try a little harder not to talk like one of the con men travelling with Huckleberry Finn, but whatever. Grammar and usage are the least of my concerns with what Santorum said. My concern is with the sentence Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.

Let us remember that Santorum is speaking of what should happen. His claim that parents educated their children runs counter to his claim that factory schools and bigger education bureaucracies have been the norm in this country, so we can safely assume that he is referring to that better, imagined past that forms the basis for most of his policy positions. Operatively, Santorum’s statement reads as parents [should educate] their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.

That is exactly the kind of tautological sentence that a decent education teaches children not to write. A good public school doesn’t just teach kids how to operate power looms; it also teaches them how to think. If we accept the notion that public schools are useful because an educated citizenry is useful, parents educated their children because it’s their responsibility to educate their children stands as a warning against the untrained mind. You can fit all sorts of bad ideas into that sentence structure:

  1. Christianity is the most important aspect of America because religion comes first.
  2. We must fight the War on Terror because otherwise the terrorists win.
  3. The dog wants more chocolate because he likes it.

Sentences like that are why it is critically important to teach people from an early age that words mean something. We reason using language, and you don’t want language to introduce the logical possibility of A because A, for the same reason that you don’t want people to write in sentence fragments. Like a line determined by one point, those things can go anywhere. Giving kids language and not teaching them to use it for specific, falsifiable statements is like giving them guns and not teaching them how to aim.

It’s not just to keep them from writing exasperating office memos, either. The children we educate in public schools today—or keep home from public school so our wives can teach them our conception of math and history—are the same people who will vote tomorrow. They will be exposed to a number of political candidates—many of whom will lie to them—and a number of ideas, many of which will be false. If they cannot say with confidence that is not true, if they have been raised to think that A because A is a valid argument, they will be at the mercy of the most charming liar. Thanks to democracy, we all will.

There is even less chance of Rick Santorum trying to eliminate public schools than there is of his becoming president. But there is something chilling about hearing the candidate of war and Christmas spew out a grammatically wrong nonsense sentence attacking public schools. It takes a certain kind of leader to tell us that free education is the problem.

A violently active, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after… I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin for my young men. —Adolf Hitler

 

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12 Comments

  1. Thanks for the sudden bout of pants-shitting at the end with that quote. As someone raised by teachers, and currently fascinated by a turn-based strategy game, I’m always in awe of people who think its a bad thing to have education handled by educated people who do it for a living.

  2. Wonderful essay. You had me cheering up to the Hitler comparison, which manages to be both gauche and, in contemporary political discourse, a bit of a cliché. To be fair, Santorum is not arguing for “no intellectual training”, just a different form of it.

  3. “A good public school doesn’t just teach kids how to operate power looms; it also teaches them how to think.” I may have to steal this as my signature block for my work email (at a community college). I keep finding myself ranting “We’re not here to fucking subsidize industry! That’s not what college is for!” If we can educate people in a specific in-demand field, great, but the primary mission is to help people to think more critically and then to govern themselves accordingly.

    A quibble with the analysis: I don’t think Santorum is launching a tautology, whether the sentence is recast as a “should” or kept as a “used to.” It’s only a tautology if you accept that people do the things that are their responsibility to do. He’s making a values statement: it turns on the issue of responsibility. Parents who educate their children are responsible. The irresponsible *don’t* tend to the education of their children. Most people don’t feel this way, and are willing to leave education to the professionals (except when they want to scream about what and how things are being taught–though they would never think to teach their kids themselves), but a rapidly growing, mostly evangelical, segment of the population is engaged in homeschooling. This is both for them and for the falsely nostalgic libertarians in the crowd. It’s also classist.

  4. @Mose, I didn’t read Dan as comparing Santorum to Hitler, because I didn’t hear Dan suggest Santorum had the intention of creating dumb children. Rather, I saw Dan arguing that Santorum’s policy would create dumb children and Santorum’s public statements demonstrated why. The Hitler quote underscored why non-dumb children are so important, amplifying Dan’s earlier points about democracy’s success hinging on the education level of its citizens.

  5. Don’t tell me we’re all just going to pretend that it wasn’t a totally bullshit move for Combat Blog to take President’s Day off. Because it was, and I think we all know it was.

  6. I did check the site about 6 times waiting for the President’s Day post. Can’t complain though, I get what I pay for.

  7. I assumed Dan was buying a mattress or a car yesterday.

    I’m very much in agreement with Mike, but I can see what you’re saying, Mose. Unfortunately, with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Three Ring Caucus and its side show freaks on the news, we do get too many Nazi references (read: any, probably). But I think the point of no education being crucial to a bad system is important. I remember reading somewhere about creating a cult, and one of the key ingredients is a dumb, middle-to-lower class. Ghengis Khan increased communication throughout his empire, but not education. He tried to raise a generation of boys who’s only education was training and watching his armies wipe villages off maps. I mean that literally. The guy would reroute rivers to wash away razed villages. Problem was these boys all started to rape, murder, and rob their neighbors when coming of age, because that was all they had ever learned.

    No, Rick Lubejizzstain is not Hitler. He is a poor teacher, arguing poorly that him teaching is a good thing. Also he’s running for one of the supposed most powerful positions on the planet.

    We are all skipping over the point that Rickie is simply wrong. Parents didn’t educate their children. The church taught them life lessons from the bible and how to keep secrets. Those that could afford it hired private tutors and/or teachers then sent their kids to university. Those that, say, farmed for a living, taught the kids how to do a job. Once there were enough people for a schoolhouse, the whole town would get together and hire a teacher, and even then they only sent their kids after the harvest until the spring planting started. The modern school year is still modeled on that.

  8. How dare you try to teach my children facts??? Then they will learn that the earth could not possibly be only 6000 years old and they will stop believing all the other myths that I teach them are truths. I’m trying to save their *souls*, not turn them into functional, responsible citizens!

    Thank you for this extremely insightful post. I only wish the people who really need to hear it and understand it were able to do so. Unfortunately, many of them have been so indoctrinated by their parents’ teachings that they cannot comprehend logical arguments such as yours. It’s sad, really.

  9. Mike B, your reasoning is subtle and intelligent as always, but I’m with Mose on this one. The Hitler quote had the structure of, “This is bad because it’s like what the Nazis did.” That’s an argumentative exaggeration and crutch that, as Mose says, is ridiculously overused and abused these days. “Conservatives,” you’ll note, use it to criticize gun control. You know why we think things associated with the Nazis are bad? Because we associate the Nazis with the killing of 6 million Jews. So, unless the object of your criticism is engaging in genocide, associating them with Nazis is dishonest–you’re not criticizing the actual resemblance that you point out, just implicitly making an unwarranted association.

    It’s beneath Dan’s considerable writerly and argumentative powers, and I was surprised to see him use it. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it was worse than the Holocaust.

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