Santorum Blames Liberals for Low History Scores

Rick Santorum is running for president.  Like a previous candidate I have mentioned, he has said many stupid things.  If you don't know who he is, I beg of you NOT to google him.  You will not like the results (No seriously, don't do it).  Anyways, this stupid comment concerns education so I thought that I would mention it on here.



When talking about the recent study which found that US students don't actually know American history, Santorum used the opportunity to blame liberals.  He called the poor scores on a survey the results of a "conscious effort on the part of the left ... to desensitize America to what American values are."  In this he inserts two ways of blaming the left.

1. We purposefully teach your children the wrong information.  Apparently, liberals have a huge impact on the curriculum and use it to screw up education.  This assumes a conspiracy of all teachers (in this case, history teachers) to agree to an alternative history which may or may not have happened just so kids would do badly on a survey.  Actually that does seem to be happening, but from the other side.  Conservatives frequently reconstruct history to suit their ideological agenda.  Take for example the Texas Board of Education or Sarah Palin's recent Paul Revere statement.  David Barton makes lots of money creating history to pander to conservative Christians.
2. We want to impose our own anti-American values on your kids.  The real reason the evil liberals screw up education is to indoctrinate children with the ideas of equality, peace, and etc.  We must teach an alternative history to support our agenda for social purposes.  Actually, this is happening too.  Conservatives use their altered histories as excuse to institute their theocratic objectives.  According to their history, the United States was founded by Jesus for the True Christians.

I am sure that there are plenty of examples of liberals making mistakes about history, but I don't seem them attempting to make public policy based on their factual errors.  Truthfully, we are all to blame for our children's education.  Only offering lip service to making schools better, we make no effort to fund education or actually improve anything.  Education should be the issue that brings both sides together (just as it brought Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton).

Santorum took a cheap shot at his percieved enemy, the liberals, and opened the door for people to mock how members of his party have screwed up historical facts.  At some point we should be able to agree on reality, as historical and scientific facts don't have a partisan point of view.