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 order to shield his own family from indoctrination, Santorum and his wife have home-schooled their seven children through the eighth grade.
This is not the first time Santorum has warned against pre-school indoctrination. As the Huffington Post reported in May, Santorum spoke to a South Carolina audience and compared pre-school to his grandfather’s experiences in Fascist-era Italy:
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.
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