Rick Santorum, former Pennsylvania Senator, is pulling ahead in the polls to secure the GOP nomination for the upcoming presidential elections. His conservative approach to social and economic issues is helping him appeal to a greater spectrum of Republican voters. Although his education policy is not detailed on his campaign website, it is apparent that Santorum believes the federal government should substantially reduce its role in education and turn the keys over to states and localities.
According to Rick Santorum’s Campaign site, “reforms at the local level should be focused on expanding consumer choice in public, private, and personalized education, attracting the best teachers to be competitive as a nation.”
Like many of his Republican counterparts, Santorum is interested in implementing an education system based on the free-market model. He wants to serve the consumer, the parent, a product that they want to pay for: a quality education. In this model, Santorum believes that it is the parent’s responsibility, not the governments, to educate their children from the beginning. He trusts this type of approach will help solve the problem of school funding accountability. Instead of schools being accountable to their government, they will be directly accountable to their customers. He hopes this will encourage innovative approaches in education in order to appeal to parents.
A critic of failing public schools, Santorum and his wife chose to homeschool their 6 children. Santorum deems the public school setting as an unrealistic way to prepare students for the real world. Because the uniformity and socialization occurring in public schools does not benefit the child, he promotes homeschooling, which allows for a more personalized approach to education.
In It Takes a Family, Santorum stated that in a home school setting it was easier to provide children with an opportunity to “interact in a rich and complex way with adults and children of other ages.” This type of environment allows children to become “better-adjusted, more at ease with adults, more capable of conversation…and in general a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers.”
Since homeschooling is not ideal for all families, Santorum also encourages fair school choice. This will create a variety of products for the consumer or parents to choose from. In order to make this choice fair, he proposes a scholarship program designed to help children from low-income families find schools that will suit their needs.
Santorum has made his views on creationism, abstinence education, and multiculturalism very clear in his speeches and 2005 best seller, ItTakes a Family. Exposing children to a variety of scientific views and theories is important to Santorum. He encourages the healthy debate of evolution and creationism in the classroom. He believes that comprehensive sex education programs are not necessarily reducing teen pregnancies or the risk of STDs. Instead he would prefer an abstinence centered approach to sex education in public schools.
In order to preserve our western civilization, Santorum discourages multiculturalism because it reduces the value of great western masterpieces. Although interested in seeing some multicultural masterpieces incorporated into our education program, he believes the focus should be on cultural literature and values associated with our western civilization.
Although an opponent of the uniformity and depersonalized socialization that occurs in public schools, Santorum believes the work of reforming this precious system should be left to states and localities. By allowing states and localities this opportunity to overhaul education, Santorum is putting the responsibility for educating our youth back into the hands of the parents. Will this “hands-off” approach to education fix this troubled American system? Our states, localities, and parents ready to have this burden placed on their shoulders?
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