Poor Rick Santorum. He will never have “the elite smart people on (his) side.”
Former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum told an audience of social conservatives at the 2012 Voters Values Summit that the founding principles in America would be sustained through “two institutions, the church and family.”
Santorum’s statements belong to a tradition of conservative rhetoric that dichotomizes those who are religious and family-oriented against those who are educated. He has resorted to a binary system of thinking: the fallacious duality between those who are conservative (religious and family-oriented) and those who are liberal (educated).
When so much of American politics is centered on polarity, critical thinking skills — the kind higher-level education produces — is just the thing to combat Santorum’s dualistic view of the world.
Critical thinking skills, as Peter Wood writes for “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” is not “being in favor of one idea and opposed to a contrary one.” They don’t create a duality of right and wrong, but a spectrum of ideas.
Santorum isn’t opposed to just any education. He opposes a liberal arts one. It’s not difficult to see why a conservative like Santorum would be threatened by higher-level education. It is an interruption of the familiar, a challenge to the pious.
A fruitful liberal arts education is a symposium of powerful ideas where educators empower their students to answer questions with ideas — not beliefs or emotions. Higher-level education emboldens us to actively question our belief systems and to intensely reassess the intellectual framework through which we lead our lives.
A humanities coursework puts us in uncomfortable situations. It compels us to interrogate the perceived immorality of conservative talking points like abortion and gay marriage. Students with a liberal arts education might form their answers based on thinkers who tell them that morality is subjective and relative to experience — not absolute and unyielding.
Universities create holes in what was a solid-belief system, but these holes are refilled with knowledge and experience. Santorum is threatened by a system that inherently challenges convention and encourages unorthodoxy.
Students who undergo higher-level education realize that politics — and life, really — is best experienced three-dimensionally. They see subtlety in politics and experience life through a kaleidoscope of multi-colored lenses. They become accustomed to dealing with uncomfortable situations and have practice in engaging in healthy conflict.
Perhaps Santorum is intimidated by how college teaches young people to resist the things they are told — to “question everything,” so to speak. It’s true, the instinct to question is automatic, but students who make the most of their liberal arts education are more likely to tolerate opposing ideas. The literature they’ve read, the art and ideas they’ve encountered, have taught them how to react in uncomfortable situations.
It is indeed ironic that Santorum has criminalized those with a liberal education, when they are the ones most likely to consider the source of his ideologies. An education rich in powerful ideas gives one the best vocabulary for political dissent.
Santorum later said in a CNN interview that his comments on the “elite smart people” were “probably not the smartest thing.”
Maybe he should go back to school.
Reach the columnist at ctruong1@asu.edu or follow her at @ce_truong.
