Shorter Rick Santorum: Know who else thought government had a role in educating children? Hitler!
It is a parent’s responsibility to educate their children. It is not the government’s job.
I admit to being puzzled as to why so many people think parent's responsibilities and government's jobs are mutually exclusive. Do we not both defend our children, for example, both at home and through constitutional mechanisms? Why, then, should each authority not have some role in education, especially when the health of the republic is at stake?
One thing I love about Vermont's constitution is that education is an integral part of our frame of government. As the state supreme court observed:
[F]or the founders of the frontier Republic of Vermont the fostering of republican values, or public “virtue” as it was commonly known in the eighteenth century, was not the empty rhetoric it often seems today; it was an urgent necessity — a matter literally affecting the survival of the new Republic.
This urgency was reflected in the Constitution, one provision of which instructed that “frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty.” Vt. Const. of 1777, ch. I, art. 16. Another constitutional provision, the so-called “Virtue” Clause, declared that “[l]aws for the encouragement of virtue, and prevention of vice and immorality, shall be made and constantly kept in force.” Id. ch. II, § 41.
Republican theory of the eighteenth century held that public “virtue” — in the broad sense of moral restraint, public responsibility, and ethical values — was the bedrock and essential ingredient of self-government. See G. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 68 (1969) (“The eighteenth century mind was thoroughly convinced that a popularly based government `cannot be supported without Virtue.'”). As John Adams wrote, “`Liberty' . . . `can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul.'” B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution 135 (1992) (quoting John Adams).(FN7)
But I guess for Santorum, there's no such thing as virtue in the classical republican sense. To him it only means, “thou shalt not use your genitals in ways of which I approve not.” Oh, and for Dog's sake,don't teach kids science!
ntodd