Smart Beginnings - State of Virginia's Early Education Program

This seems like an easy thing to support: most of the critical brain development in human beings occurs in the first five years of life. Critical synapses are being built that will carry each child into adulthood. Study after study show the positive impact of early childhood education: children are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, less likely to live in poverty, have a teenage pregnancy, commit a crime and be incarcerated, in general, being a productive member of society. So it would seem like -- you should pardon the expression -- a no brainer to get behind early childhood education.

But not if you're Rick Santorum.

The man who prays you can't spell "Santorum" in the Google search engine thinks that edumacating young children is a dangerous thing:

Former Republican Senator Rick Santorum has added another unconventional platform issue to his conservative campaign: opposing early childhood education. In a town hall in Iowa, the presidential candidate made clear he opposed any programs to put children in school as soon as possible, warning that they were ploys for socialists to take “your children from the womb so they can indoctrinate your children as to what they want them to be.”

Santorum was quoted in the Des Moines Register speaking to a town hall this week, demanding that education be individualized. Somewhere along the track, however, he began to attack all early childhood education, arguing that parents should be educating children– not teachers– and that the threat of indoctrination loomed with public school education, particularly in early years:

“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. 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,” he said. [...]

“We need to get the federal government out of that business. We need a leader in Washington to start talking with the states and the communities to rally parents to demand that the educational establishment in this country start meeting the needs of their child, not children. See, that is the difference. Obviously, socialists love children, just like they love people in groups of one million or more,” he said.

Frankly, the only way he's going to get people to vote for him is to have them stupid and uneducated, so maybe taking this kind of mind-blowingly idiotic and short-sighted stance is his tactic to stay in the race.