Rick Santorum has received lots of criticism from the left and the more moderate incarnation of Republican — often affectionately termed “RINO” (“Republican in Name Only”) — for his oft-repeated remarks that higher education is an instrument of ideologues who warp the minds of their students into Democratic voters.

The problem with Santorum’s remarks and the beliefs of similar conservatives is less nefarious than that. Instead of what they refer to as “liberal education” being a ploy, “liberal education” is much more a matter of punctuation — capitalization, even — than anything else.

What Santorum and his ilk are up in arms about is “Liberal” education, with emphasis on a capital L. The difference between capital-L and small-l liberalism is the same as that between Republicanism and republicanism or Conservatism and conservatism. Those with capital letters are ideologies with articles of faith. Their adherents risk political alienation and exclusion if they violate dogma.

The –isms with small letters are different. They are systems, or frameworks, within which the members can move as they wish. They are more like a party tent than an auditorium with assigned seats, or like a highway where cars can change lanes then a railroad track where trains go where the rails take them.

Uncapitalized, liberal simply means free. Through a liberal education, we are supposed to be exposed to a variety of subjects in order to give us a broad base of both knowledge and skills so that we can approach our own problems and the problems of our communities from many angles and see them from a variety of viewpoints. It is the exact opposite of indoctrination.

To that end, institutions such as Iowa State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences require pupils to take “general education” classes: three credits of classes in mathematics, eight credits in the natural sciences, nine in the social sciences and 12 in the arts and humanities.

The indoctrination kind of liberalism is Liberalism. Like Republican or Conservative indoctrination, it makes free-thinking students into drones who are only able to produce talking-point carbon copies of some probably anonymous scholar’s genius.

It is our insistence on continuing to unquestioningly hold our preconceived notions that prevents us most from learning and from changing our worlds. We are against college indoctrinating students with any -ism.

But as far as college is liberal, freeing the minds of students, we support it. To the extent that students — and political leaders — struggle with the ideas of higher education, they should examine their own perspectives. Perhaps the ideology in their own minds is keeping them from being liberal.