Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Rick Santorum, Democracy and Education

This post comes from guest blogger Zach Fox, a masters degree candidate at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University.

In a season of disheartening and sometimes alarming political rhetoric, Rick Santorum’s recent speech to the conservative Values Voters Summit may be a new low for social studies educators following this fall’s presidential election race. Santorum’s speech included a number of ahistorical assertions. He also clearly dismissed attempts by economic conservatives to distance themselves from social conservatives, but these are not new positions from the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania.

More troubling is Santorum’s jarring claim that, “[social conservatives] will never have the elite smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do.” One wonders just who he means by “the elite smart people.” After all, Santorum has three post-secondary degrees, including an M.B.A. and a J.D. He served two terms as a U.S. Senator, and he emerged as former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s chief rival in the Republican presidential primary contests. He apparently means elite, smart, socially liberal people, but conveniently omits that last qualifier.

Santorum's statements position socially conservative Americans, and the founts of their values (the church and the family), as opponents of anti-democratic forces, here vaguely labeled "elite smart people...[who] believe they should have the power to tell you what to do." These forces are closely tied to higher education, continues Santorum: “So our colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side.”

Santorum's account of democracy's relationship to educated citizens is bewildering. According to his speech, we shouldn't aspire to education because smart people become (or inherently are?) bossy and undemocratic. And yet the inverse appears to be Americans thoroughly engaged by grossly inaccurate characterizations of American history -- Santorum, by all accounts I could find, received a resounding standing ovation.

John Dewey would be mortified. Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, noted in a recent New York Times editorial about American higher education that one of John Dewey’s lasting insights is “that learning in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom. In a nation that aspires to democracy, that’s what education is primarily for: the cultivation of freedom within society.” Learning cultivates freedom, and democratic participation is one important expression of that freedom.

Taking for granted that learning can take place in our present education system, Santorum's statements are absurd and insulting, not least of all to the many conservatives who might like to consider themselves either elite or smart. For all his talk of American values, Santorum seems to have little regard for one of America’s most enduring aspirations – democracy – and in the legitimacy of well-educated, well-informed, reasonable, open-minded Americans to be part of the American narrative. It’s this assertion that stung most deeply for this future social studies educator.

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