Santorum: Early childhood education is "fascism"

I did not know much about Rick Santorum before I Googled his name, but now I know too much about Santorum -- more than I wanted to know.

I Googled his name because he used a visit to South Carolina in May to make disparaging remarks about early childhood education.

Rick Santorum, a possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, even raised the specter of Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy in a speech here Friday night while explaining why his grandfather emigrated to the U.S. His uncle, he said, "used to get up in a brown shirt and march and be told how to be a good little fascist."

"I don't know, maybe they called it early pre-K or something like that, that the government sponsored to get your children in there so they can indoctrinate them," Santorum said.

A couple of weeks ago, Santorum made similar comments about early childhood education -- and the people who teach pre-kindergarten -- in Iowa.

Rick Santorum fired a verbal salvo at early-education programs on Tuesday, telling an Iowa crowd that government pre-school programs are part of a hideous plot by the government to indoctrinate children.

"It is a parent's responsibility to educate their children. It is not the government's job. We have sort of lost focus here a little bit," said Santorum, the Des Moines Register reports.

"Of course, the government wants their hands on your children as fast as they can. That is why I opposed all these early starts and pre-early starts, and early-early starts. They want your children from the womb so they can indoctrinate your children as to what they want them to be. I am against that."

In the article about that appearance in Iowa, it says that Santorum and his wife "have home-schooled their seven children through the eighth grade." Home-schooling one's child or children is a right and valuable option for parents who want that option. The item said that the Santorums opted to home-school their children "in order to shield his own family from indoctrination."

Personal note: The Santorums may want to shield their children from Googling their family name, too. Word to the wise.

Santorum also has announced his theory to explain why American students perform poorly on tests of U.S. history.

This time Santorum is arguing that the reason so few U.S. students perform well in U.S. history is because of “a conscious effort on the part of the left who has a huge influence on our curriculum, to desensitize America to what American values are so they’re more pliable to the new values that they would like to impose on America.”