Santorum is hardly the first homeschooling father to run for president, as John Edwards kids were also homeschooled, but he is definitely the most verbal about it. In recent speaches, Santorum went as far as to call public schooling “Anachronistic”, meaning he finds public schools to be chronologically inconsistency or out of place in time. Because of his loud championing of homeschooling, Santorum undoubtedly has many homeschoolers beaming with pride. This homeschooler, however, is noticing a great deal of negative attention toward homeschooling from the media.
Timothy Noah, of The New Republic website states, “To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy. Santorum might as well say he’s opposed to knowledge itself. It's absolutely stupefying that a major presidential candidate would evangelize against education in this fashion.”
Erin Gloria Ryan of Jezebel.com accuses him of “calling for an end to public school. She goes on to state, ridicule his thinking and suggests that homophobia and misogynism are the reasons he probably things that everyone can’t homeschool.
Numerous pundits have also pointed out that Mr. Santorum had his own children in a public charter school, paid for by Pennsylvania tax payers while his family lived in Virginia, which is a fraudulent act.
With all that said, I have to state that because I homeschool my kids, I am actually in agreement with a lot that Mr. Santorum has to say about homeschooling. I believe that homeschooled children are “a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers”. I also agree that public schools are essentially a “radically narrow, age-segregated environment”. I also believe that the government should back off of public schools since interference has only caused worse and worse results.
However, I believe that his delivery is seriously flawed. The best way to turn the public against homeschooling is to unfairly criticize all-things public school. The fact is that not all parents are equipped to homeschool, and not all kids are homeschool-able. I think that it is better to champion the benefits of homeschooling without being negative about the only other alternative as if 90% of the country’s population is crazy. We have to remember that to the rest of the country, we are the crazy ones. This is not a good time to wage a war on public education!
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