Opinionator

Schooling Santorum

By DICK CAVETT

Truth be told, I’d planned on a lighthearted topic for today.

But in line with last time’s subject — the deleterious effect the news can have on your health — those threats to the blood pressure continue with no shortage of headache and stomach-acid-stirring topics to jostle our wellness, if not our actuarial tables. A few minutes of CNN this morning did it.

Just about any pair of random news items are enough to make you reach for the Bisodol. Today’s two: the stupidity of the Koran burning by American military personnel and our baffling, cowering impotence in the face of Bashar al-Assad’s bloody slaughter, in Syria, of man, woman and child — victims apparently not as worthy of our caring, or of life, as their counterparts were in Libya. You can get ill from this.

And there’s still Rick Santorum, alas. As Joan Rivers might say, “Please!!”

We learn from him that contraception is a sin. Giving birth (sorry) to the possibly rude question of how the Santori as a couple and as obedient Catholics managed to have only eight children over all those years if they didn’t … well, never mind.

Remember the “rhythm” method, humorously called “Vatican Roulette”? A friend of mine says he knows full well that he and his sister “owe our existence to it.” An apt name, roulette being the worst-odds sucker game in the casino: Let’s do it, dear. The odds are only 37 to 1 against us.

Maybe they cheated now and then. The thought might not have arisen were I not typing this shortly after one of the most soundly defeated incumbent senators in recent history spent part of his time at the — one dearly hopes — final “debate” reeling off the number of times he was forced to vote contrary to his beliefs!

We’re taught in early school days by our wise teachers and kindly parents that it is not nice to comment on or make fun of people’s appearance. But does Santorum look like a president?

Not that you have to be of majestic aspect, I suppose, but he’s really pushing it. When you think of Lincoln or F.D.R., to name but two, Santorum in comparison looks like someone who’d play a character called “Ricky” in a mildly amusing sitcom.

Try to picture Rick’s countenance Photoshopped into that famous picture from World War II, sitting in Roosevelt’s place, side by side with Stalin and Churchill in Yalta. It would look like two redwoods and a spirea bush. Is that bland Santorum visage suitable for Mount Rushmore? That would look like The Great Four and Pee-wee Herman.

The sweater vests don’t help.

My soul similarly rolls over and groans whenever Santorum uses the phrase “home-schooling.” I first heard about it in the dim days when the John Birch Society was a going thing. (Young folks, I don’t blame you for not believing that this organization held that President Dwight Eisenhower was a “conscious, dedicated agent” of the Soviet Union.) Some benighted McCarthy-admiring parents decided to pluck their children from the clutches of “commies” teaching our kiddies their godless doctrine.

I have lost track of distant relatives of mine, parents who also snatched their young kids from school and, for their remaining school years, stuffed them mainly with the Bible. (I’d love to know how they did on their SATs.)

I feel sorry for the poor kids whose parents feel they’re qualified to teach them at home. Of course, some parents are smarter than some teachers, but in the main I see home-schooling as misguided foolishness.

Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training. Where did the idea come from that anybody can do it? How many parents can intuit how to do it? (Pardon unconscious rhyme there.) My parents were teachers and the thought of home-schooling sent them rolling before they were in their graves. Especially when parents, complaining of their kids’ schooling, wrote in report card responses things like “I am loathe to critacize…”; “my childs consantration”; “normalicy”; “my daughter’s abillaties”; “her examatian grades”; “she should of done better”; “greater supervizion,” etc., into the night.

To deny kids the adventure and socialization of going to school, thereby missing out on the activities, gossip, projects, dances, teams, friendships and social skills developed — to deny kids this is shortsighted and cruel. I think of the mournful home-school kid watching his friends board the school bus, laughing, gossiping and enjoying all that vital socialization we call schooldays.

Besides, aren’t you arguably a better person for having gone to school rather than having it funneled into you by dreary old Ma or Pa in their faded bathrobes at home?

And what is the argument for it? For some, is it to protect their innocent ones from hearing words like, oh, “sex” and “contraception”? From forced association with those less desirable ethnically? Maybe it’s to keep them safe from radical notions like the idea that fossils and carbon-dating aren’t put there by the Devil to fool the scientists, but prove the world has billions, not thousands, of years on it.

Surely, there are parents caught in mediocre school districts with little choice but to give their kids the best shot at a rounded exposure to arts, letters, the sciences, and so on, and are admirably able to do so at home — thereby sparing them the teachers who can’t spell and who tell the kids, as in one friend’s case, that the band around the center of the earth on the globe is called “the equation.”

Who knows what sorts of fears haunt the minds of home-schooling parents? I guess it’s always possible, when Sally or Billy is walking to school, that a dark figure might leap out of the shrubbery, maniacally shrieking, “There’s climate change!”

Again, teaching takes skill and education and dedication. Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.

- New York Times

(brilliant)