Mitt: Educational Marxist?

According to MSNBC, yesterday GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Hillary Clinton a Marxist, remarking that “she said we’ve always been an on-your-own society…we should be a we’re-all-in-it-together society, a shared responsibility society. So it’s out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx.”

Romney might be right about Hillary Clinton, but based on several things he’s said recently about education, one can’t help but wonder if there’s not a fair bit of Big Brother in him, too.

At the same event where Romney attacked collectivist Hillary, for instance, he lauded the intrusive, federal No Child Left Behind Act. He likes the testing, he said, apparently not caring that it’s mandated by the central government. Even scarier, he endorsed a national program requiring that “before a parent can send a child to school for the first time, they’ve got to go to a weekend where they learn about being prepared to support their child in school.”

To top all this off, yesterday the Associated Press reported that Romney has floated the idea of rewarding college aid based on what careers recipients choose. “I like the idea of linking the level of support that we're able to provide to young people going to college to the contributions they're going to make to our society.” So not only is Romney going to keep NCLB and force moms and dads into government parenting academies, he’s going to engineer who gets what based, apparently, on how much government decides different jobs contribute to society?

Maybe Hillary isn’t the only closet Marxist in the 2008 race.