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America's most famous home-schooler spent 3 years soaking PA taxpayers for his kids' education
Sunday, Feb 26, 2012 1:00 PM 15:18:02 GMT-0800
Rick Santorum’s home-school hokum
America's most famous home-schooler spent three years soaking Pennsylvania taxpayers for his kids' education
By Andrew O'Hehir
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/rick_santorums_home_school_hokum/
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.”
That’s a crude but historically accurate summary, and many of the home-schoolers I know in New York City and other non-heartland locations would agree that that legacy — standardized education aimed at creating a standardized workforce — is problematic. In Santorum’s 2005 book “It Takes a Family,” he offered a defense of the age-diverse, socially mixed context of home-schooling that could just as well have been written by a utopian educational reformer in Boston or Berkeley: “In a home school … children interact in a rich and complex way with adults and children of other ages all the time. In general, they are better-adjusted, more at ease with adults, more capable of conversation, more able to notice when a younger child needs help or comfort, and in general a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers.”
As Dana Goldstein’s recent attack on home-schooling in Slate reveals, the issue lays bare an intriguing split among progressives between the competing or complementary values of communal responsibility and individual freedom. Suffice it to say, however, that no one on the left, either hippie home-schooler or an ardent public-school advocate, is likely to agree with Santorum’s radical remedies. It’s difficult to tell exactly what he has in mind, but it seems to involve defunding both federal and state support for public education, and forcing poor or middle-class families — indeed, almost everyone who works for a living — into a Darwinian struggle over educational resources.
Rick Santorum’s home-school hokum
America's most famous home-schooler spent three years soaking Pennsylvania taxpayers for his kids' education
By Andrew O'Hehir
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/26/rick_santorums_home_school_hokum/
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.”
That’s a crude but historically accurate summary, and many of the home-schoolers I know in New York City and other non-heartland locations would agree that that legacy — standardized education aimed at creating a standardized workforce — is problematic. In Santorum’s 2005 book “It Takes a Family,” he offered a defense of the age-diverse, socially mixed context of home-schooling that could just as well have been written by a utopian educational reformer in Boston or Berkeley: “In a home school … children interact in a rich and complex way with adults and children of other ages all the time. In general, they are better-adjusted, more at ease with adults, more capable of conversation, more able to notice when a younger child needs help or comfort, and in general a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers.”
As Dana Goldstein’s recent attack on home-schooling in Slate reveals, the issue lays bare an intriguing split among progressives between the competing or complementary values of communal responsibility and individual freedom. Suffice it to say, however, that no one on the left, either hippie home-schooler or an ardent public-school advocate, is likely to agree with Santorum’s radical remedies. It’s difficult to tell exactly what he has in mind, but it seems to involve defunding both federal and state support for public education, and forcing poor or middle-class families — indeed, almost everyone who works for a living — into a Darwinian struggle over educational resources.
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