Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Wednesday that “the left” uses universities to indoctrinate young people for the purpose of “holding and maintaining power.”
After saying “we’ve lost, unfortunately, our entertainment industry,” Santorum told a Naples, Florida, audience that “we’ve lost our higher education, that was the first to go a long time ago.”
“It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college,” said the former Pennsylvania senator. “The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure that there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?”
He continued: “If they taught Judeo-Christian principles in those colleges and universities, they would be stripped of every dollar. If they teach radical secular ideology, they get all the government support that they can possibly give them. Because you know 62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it.”
Santorum went on to encourage his audience not to “give money” to colleges and universities that he said are causing harm to the country.
“I’ll bet you there are people in this room who give money to colleges and universities who are undermining the very principles of our country every single day by indoctrinating kids with left-wing ideology,” he said. “And you continue to give to these colleges and universities. Let me have a suggestion: Stop it.”
Santorum said at the same event that he is leaving the Florida campaign trail this weekend - ahead of the state’s January 31 primary - to go home and retrieve his tax returns, so he can release them.
A new CNN/Time/ORC International poll showed Santorum at 11 percent in the Sunshine State, far behind rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.
The bold part is my doing.
Yes, Santorum. Because that’s all that is taught at college: Secular ideology. Because I’m definitely not taking physics, calculus, economics, and other courses that have nothing to do with religion or government at all.
See, this is what I hate about people like him. Those guys who think that if things aren’t being taught one way, it’s being refocused the other way. Theology classes exist for a reason. The fact that I don’t learn about religion in every single one of my classes is not a big conspiracy to eliminate religion from existing, it’s simply because it has nothing to do with a lot of subjects. Not to mention there are colleges out there who put a focus on religion along with studies like Baylor University and Brigham Young University.
I see this as nothing more than an attempt to demonize college and higher education because it teaches people to think critically. If you can turn people against higher education, it’s only a matter of time before they destroy themselves. The grade school system has already been destroyed with the use of standardized testing. College is a pretty life-changing step for a lot of people; turning them against the idea is only going to hurt them. But it will do exactly what a lot of politicians want: Making everyone a dispensable, mindless cog in the machine.
What he/she said.
