In a campaign stop in Ohio, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum called the viability of the public education system into question

“Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America?” he said. “Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.”

“Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly — much less that the state government should be running schools — is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools.

Mr. Santorum isn't just wrong, he is absurdly wrong. The Ohio constitution enshrines the provision of public education by the state. It's a defining core value, not some new fangled government edict dreamed up by supporters of bureaucratic big government 50 years ago. This was written into our constitution before US industrialization began and factories were built, it was written in our constitution in 1851.

Mr. Santorum seems to want to take us back to before 1851.

Update

B Herringten on twitter digs into the even further distant past and notes that funding of public education in Ohio began with the Land Ordinance of 1785 before Ohio was even a state

The ordinance was also significant for establishing a mechanism for funding public education. Section 16 in each township was reserved for the maintenance of public schools. Many schools today are still located in section sixteen of their respective townships, although a great many of the school sections were sold to raise money for public education