Here is what Rick Santorum said this week: “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”
Let’s first put this extraordinarily stupid comment into perspective by citing the fact that Mr. Santorum has a master’s degree in business administration and a law degree. That puts him an MBA ahead of Mr. Obama. His comment proves his cynical hypocrisy.
That said, let’s recognize that a man who considers support for higher education snobbish and elitist would be a destructive president.
It is idealistic to wish that every American had the advantages of a college education. But it is nothing but realistic to recognize that education lifts men and women up to higher levels of achievement and personal satisfaction. No one can look at personal achievement levels in this country — and every other nation on earth — without seeing the connection between achievement and education.
Santorum is an example. While he was defeated by an 18 percent margin when he ran for re-election as senator from Pennsylvania, he went to work in Washington trading on his political connections and was earning nearly $1 million a year when he felt the divine call to run for president. One doubts that he would deny his high-level college education helped him into the top 1 percent of America’s earners.
But he has left that snobbery behind him and now attacks education because he rightly believes that a college education helps young men and women learn to think for themselves — and that’s the last thing he wants for them.
A President Santorum would take the United States of America straight downhill.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
