Using education to entrench privilege » « The Brazil model for reducing hunger and poverty

Santorum on American history

I think that the pace of campaigning is taking its toll on Rick Santorum and he has reached the stage where he is free-associating as a result of fatigue. He said in a speech about how he “read somewhere” that almost none of the California state universities teach American history.

How could he not realize that such a statement is preposterous on its face and would open him up to ridicule? Only a person who has lost all critical thinking skills would accept such a statement at face value. The Colbert Report provides the appropriate take down.

(This clip appeared on April 3, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)

Using education to entrench privilege » « The Brazil model for reducing hunger and poverty

Comments

  1. slc1 says

    When I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, it was a requirement that one had to take a 1 year course in American History or pass a written exam in the subject in order to graduate. I don’t know if this is still a requirement.

  3. 'Tis Himself says

    Santorum missed a big one. I spent three years going to Harvard and I did not take a single US history class. Not one! The point that I was an economics graduate student may have had something to do with that.

  5. slc1 says

    The second semester course (1865-present) was taught by one Grady McWhiney, who was a visiting assistant professor from Southern Mississippi University. The late Prof. McWhiney was best known for his very critical assessments of Robert E. Lee’s generalship, which he considered greatly responsible for the Confederate failure in the Civil War.

  6. jamessweet says

    I never took an American history class while getting a BS/MS in Computer Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology. Also, they taught me to eat babies!

    Anyway, I think you are right that the campaign trail is getting to him. So far, Santorum has showed a pretty good ability to stay on target (the problem being, of course, that his target is everybody who doesn’t have a penis which they use solely for the purpose of depositing sperm into fertile vaginas), and this was definitely an uncharacteristic gaffe.

  7. jufulu says

    I think that we should refer to Santorum’s latest gaff as a Bachmann moment.

    (In a side note, both of their names are being marked as misspelled by Firefox.)

  8. Trebuchet says

    Colbert for President! And I didn’t even like him when he was on The Daily Show.

    I must now head for Politifact and see if he got a “Pants on Fire” yet.

    Disclaimer: I have a first cousin who teaches American History in the UC system.

  10. Aspect Sign says

    Maybe I am just being too cynical but I can’t help thinking it has more to do with confidence that your base will accept whatever you say uncritically and reject the input of critical sources.

    I remember back a little bit when he said that 5% of deaths in Holland were due to involuntary euthanasia of the elderly. That the elderly all wore bracelets saying do not euthanize and were terrified of going to the hospital. I watched the video of the speech and the room was full of gasps and mutterings of shock. They believed every word.

    Santorum has a history of these kinds of comments and he never acknowledges that what he said was completely wrong and I think deliberately dishonest.

    I think he is what he claims to be and like many strongly religious people believes the ends justify the means and the greater the end the worse the means that can be justified.

  11. Mano Singham says

    That was quite an interesting thread. I did not go all the way to the end but wonder if it ended in a flame war, as long threads tend to do.

  12. San Ban says

    Why is anyone shocked or even mildly surprised at that frothiest of bigots uttering such an outright and easily checkable lie? He’s talking to people who value unquestioning belief in the unlikeliest of events over observable, testable facts.

  13. smrnda says

    As for American history, before college every single year was American history, except one year in high school which attempted to cover ‘world history.’

    During college I took a class on “Western Civilization” that covered some period of time that I think began in the late middle ages and ended before World War One in which the United States was mentioned and several non-Western history courses which were required, as I’m assuming the college knew that all the undergraduates had been taught plenty of American History and would be better served by a requirement to learn about the rest of the planet.

    Either way, I agree with the above post by Aspect Sign that Santorum’s base will believe anything he says, no matter how ridiculous. He seems a lot like many other religious-right conspiracy theorists, and I think that they truly to believe what they say. They already know the basic ‘narrative’ of America that informs all of their thinking, and they can extrapolate any ‘fact’ from that set of assumptions. Santorum knows that colleges are liberal, that California is ‘liberal’ in some way, and he knows that liberals are engaged in an anti-American conspiracy; therefore, they are obviously (without needing to investigate the truth of the claim) not teaching US history, or else have replaced it with ‘ethnic studies’ in an attempt to undermine the belief in American exceptionalism.

    This is why logic and reason don’t seem to work in debates with these people.

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