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Opinion|Why Conservatives Can’t Stop Talking About Aristotle

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WHY CONSERVATIVES CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT ARISTOTLE

THE 2,500-YEAR-OLD ROOTS OF RON DESANTIS’S EDUCATION PLAN.

Thursday, May 4th, 2023

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been
reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode
audio before quoting from this transcript and emailtranscripts@nytimes.comwith
any questions.

lulu garcia-navarro

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and this is “First
Person.” Maybe you’ve heard the term classical education. It’s an old idea
that’s newly in favor, especially among conservatives. The organizing principle
is that education should be rooted in the Western canon, the great books of the
Western world, usually starting with the ancient Greeks.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has championed classical education. In
Tennessee last year, Governor Bill Lee threw his weight behind opening a network
of classical charter schools in partnership with Hillsdale, a conservative
Christian college. And it’s all caught the attention of Fox News, which ran an
entire series recently about the educational model.

Jeremy Wayne Tate is a key player in classical education’s revival. He was a
teacher and also attended seminary before starting a company called The Classic
Learning Test, which offers an alternative to the College Board’s SAT. Florida
is considering adopting the CLT as an alternate admissions exam for state
schools. That could give the test much greater reach and potentially change
public education across the country. Today on “First Person,” Jeremy Wayne Tate
looks to the past for the future of American education.

Jeremy, today you run a testing company, but I understand that you started your
career in the classroom. Can you tell me about your first teaching job?

jeremy tate

Sure. I taught at Progress High School in Brooklyn, New York. If you go down the
L train, it’s off the Grand Street stop on the L train. And I taught there for
three years. This is a school that was serving a population, 100 percent
minority students. It was a community that had had a lot of struggles. There was
a lot of suffering and a lot of pain. The experience there was profound in
shaping my views on education.

lulu garcia-navarro

Well, I mean, take me into that classroom. I mean, what was it like?

jeremy tate

Yeah, so engagement was the challenge. And so the students that were often
involved in gang activity, drug activity. And we’ve got a lesson on the
Federalists and the anti-Federalists. Where do you even begin to try to make
this engaging to them? As a rule, 90 percent of them were bored out of their
minds. They were not dialed in. They didn’t have an understanding of why school
should matter or why they cared to learn.

And as I reflected on that, I thought a lot about my own experience. I actually
kind of hated school growing up. I was bored out of my mind K through junior
year in high school. And I actually started reading as a senior in high school
CS Lewis, and it was an introduction to a whole new world of why questions about
the big things in life. But what it did was that I was suddenly interested in
every subject as well and suddenly started to do very well in school. But that
didn’t happen until it was first introduced to these bigger questions about what
is human happiness, what is the good life, is there a God, does God exist. So I
think these questions are crucial for students to become engaged.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you’re not seeing a lot of engagement from students, which you understand
from your own experience. Where did that thought lead you?

jeremy tate

So even when I was teaching in New York, I was starting at Westminster Seminary
in Philadelphia. And it wasn’t ever the intention of any course, but I became
really obsessed with this question, which may sound so basic, of literally just
what is education?

lulu garcia-navarro

So you were teaching and going to seminary at the same time, so there was this
kind of cross-pollination happening?

jeremy tate

That’s right. But it occurred to me, just thinking about my teaching experience,
that for nearly every other generation, what they were trying to do in this big,
huge project of education, the main thing they were going after was human
formation. It was the shaping of the person, maybe even moreso than what they
were learning. The idea was that you’re cultivating virtue.

The other thing they seem to be doing — and this is cross-cultural — is passing
down kind of this treasury of knowledge. And I really had this moment at a bat
mitzvah — and I’ve only been to a couple of bat mitzvahs. It was my daughter’s
friend. And she was this little tiny girl, and she was being physically handed
by her parents the Torah. And it was massive. And it was kind of funny because
you could hardly see the little girl when they handed it to her. But I saw that,
and I was like, that’s it. That is what education is. It’s this passing down
what is most important from one generation to the next and also about the
shaping to pass down the values that the community holds most dear.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

lulu garcia-navarro

How did you start to think about that in practical terms in the classroom? I
mean, what did you change?

jeremy tate

Yeah, it’s a great question and a really tough question because my experience at
the time was an experience of becoming very skeptical, actually, about public
education as it’s currently being offered and experience in the United States.
So it was growing skepticism for what we were doing.

And it was also meeting more and more students who are being homeschooled,
students coming out of classical Christian schools, classical charter schools,
and seeing — in no way is this intended to bash public school families. I went
to public school, again, taught in public schools for years. But I noticed
something really different, a consistency in terms of maturity, thoughtfulness
that was a reflection of the education they were receiving.

lulu garcia-navarro

And so what did you do? I mean, did you stay in the public school system?

jeremy tate

I didn’t, no. I was also a convert in 2010 to Catholicism, which was kind of
funny because I went to a seminary that was very, fairly anti-Catholic. And so I
wanted to get into an authentically, faithfully Catholic school, and I
discovered that school in 2014, Mount de Sales Academy. And my daughters go
there now. It’s in Catonsville, Maryland. And it’s run by these Dominican
sisters. We would call them the dancing Dominicans because they would literally
dance in the hallways. And it’s one of the few growing orders in the United
States. And so I’m talking full habit that they’re wearing, but many of them
were in their 20s. So got into that school in 2014.

lulu garcia-navarro

Did you see what you’d been imagining once you got to a Catholic school
environment? Did it fulfill your vision of moral formation?

jeremy tate

In so many ways, absolutely, yes, just even the students seeing the life of
these Dominican sisters. And so they take a vow of poverty, chastity, and
obedience. And you can believe conceptually, like, people can have a vow of
poverty and still be happy. But when you actually see them living with such joy
every day, consistently, it has a profoundly shaping influence.

I would make one kind of exception, and this is a big part of my story is I felt
like when I got to Mount de Sales that there was a tension that was really
noticeable with this vision for education that these Dominican sisters had with
the College Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

The College Board, the not-for-profit behind the SAT and advanced placement, AP
courses among other things?

jeremy tate

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

And it was really — what was really noticeable?

jeremy tate

The influence of the College Board. And the way that this really came home for
me, and I think this was — I won’t forget this. The sisters, they introduced a
class, an intro to philosophy. And it was an elective, and hardly any students
signed up for it. And I was talking to students, saying, why didn’t you want to
take the philosophy class? I mean, these are the great questions in life. What
is happiness? What is the good life? How does God want me to live? Is there a
God? These are the greatest questions that any human ought to be asking.

And I remember students saying, well, there’s no AP points. I’m not going to get
the five AP points with this. And I remember thinking, what in the world? We
can’t get our top students to take philosophy because it’s not five AP points?
And I think that was the beginning of this wild idea of well, maybe there needs
to be a competitor to the College Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you perceived the College Board really in some ways dictating what students
were learning and interested in learning?

jeremy tate

In a profound way. And it drove home to me this concept that the test itself is
a teacher. The tests teach. We’re taught, as education majors, to think about
testing primarily as an evaluative tool. And I started to think, wait a minute,
maybe it’s not mostly even evaluative. Maybe it’s more pedagogical. I think it’s
maybe literally one of the few ideas in education that almost everybody agrees
with, that the test ends up driving the curriculum.

lulu garcia-navarro

Well, explain to me exactly what you saw is wrong about teachers teaching to the
College Board standards. I mean, they test math and reading and writing. I mean,
what did you see as flawed in the College Board’s approach?

jeremy tate

Yeah, I think it was twofold. I mean, it was what the College Board was leaving
off of the test and then I think some of what was being on the test as well. And
the College Board a couple of years ago, you know, Bernie Sanders was on the
SAT. I think it’s unlikely they would have — I don’t know — Ted Cruz or some
conservative.

And so I think that there is more and more people seeing a political bias from
the College Board, maybe more reflected in AP US history and AP European
history. They would leave the AP European history class and have a very negative
view of the church’s contribution to culture and society, rather than a more
nuanced view. And we wouldn’t have hospitals. We wouldn’t have universities. We
wouldn’t have orphanages. These were all things that the Catholic Church brought
to the world in medieval Christendom. I feel like they were not telling that
story, the College Board, and more and more parents and teachers were becoming
concerned about the influence and the clear political agenda behind the College
Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, what I’m hearing you say is that you would have liked to have seen more
reference to and celebration of the Catholic Church’s role, but most people
aren’t Catholic.

jeremy tate

Yeah. Most people aren’t Catholic. But I think just to take just the university
itself, the concept of a university really was distinctly a concept, an idea,
kind of born out of medieval Christendom. So it doesn’t mean somebody needs to
convert to Roman Catholicism. But I think to have a decent sense of what is a
university and where did it come from, somebody should be aware of that history.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, the Catholic Church was vital in establishing, as you say, the earliest
universities in Europe around the 12th century, and eventually it established
some in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries, including my alma mater,
Georgetown University.

But I’m just wondering about, why not include, then, the influence of Eastern
traditions, say in China, which have been credited for setting up the earliest
systems of education or the influence of Islam and those first higher education
institutions that they set up in what became the model for universities in
Europe? I mean, I guess the question is, where do you start the clock?

jeremy tate

I think in America, I mean, given that we’re founded and initially the influence
of all things English, especially in the early days and in system of government,
I think for students to have a good understanding of our system of government,
where it comes from, I do think that there should be an emphasis. I think it has
been a bit of one of the downsides of the multicultural approach is that
students get a lot of everything but not any real substance of anything. And I
don’t think you can deeply appreciate any culture unless you have some culture
to call your own.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

lulu garcia-navarro

So eventually in response to the problems you saw with the College Board and the
SAT, you decided to create an alternative test, The Classic Learning Test. Let’s
talk about classical learning or classical education for people who may not know
what it is. How do you define it?

jeremy tate

I’ve been in rooms with all the greatest minds that are in this movement that we
call the classical renewal movement, or some people say the recovery movement.
And it’s really, really hard to define because it is so big. So I think the main
difference is what we would call the telos or the goal. What is the goal of
education?

Is the goal of education, fundamentally, to have worker bees in a factory, which
in some ways I think is the origins of the compulsory education system we have
right now? Or is the goal of education the formation of the whole human person
to love what is good and to not love what is not good or what is evil? And I
think the latter definition kind of defines or gets at the very heart of what
classical education is about.

And then I think it’s also defined by, again, this kind of treasury that’s being
passed down. We’re passing down the great treasure trove of what you may call
the canon, these great luminaries that have — really, it’s often quoted Matthew
Arnold as saying “the very best of what has been thought and said.” That is the
heart and soul of a classical education.

lulu garcia-navarro

How is the philosophy of your test different from the SAT? What are you testing
for?

jeremy tate

Yeah, again, so born out of this concept that the test ends up driving the
curriculum, CLT has what we call an author bank. And the author bank has about
200 authors, and 2/3 of everything that we put in front of students is going to
come from this author bank. So students taking the CLT, what are they going to
see that they would never see on an SAT or ACT?

Well, we’ve had passages from Charles Darwin on the CLT. We’ve had passages from
CS Lewis. We’ve had passages from Dante. We’ve had passages from Flannery
O’Connor or Catherine of Siena. So I think for a student receiving a homeschool
education or a classical school or a Catholic school, actually, even just public
school students who maybe enjoy reading on their own, the CLT is a better tool,
we would argue, to kind of showcase their academic ability.

lulu garcia-navarro

Given that this test came out of seeing a disconnect between what was being
taught at your previous Catholic school and the moral education you envisioned,
because in your telling of the College Board’s influence, were you primarily
thinking of the audience for this test as religious institutions initially?

jeremy tate

Not necessarily. I think the early enthusiasts of CLT, I think, ended up having
a big impact on what you’d call brand perception or kind of reputation. And so
these were schools like Saint Thomas Aquinas College in California or
Christendom College in Front Royal Virginia. But we have always wanted every
college, every four year college in the country, to use the CLT as an admission
standard.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, as you’ve said, though, many of the early adopters of the test were
faith-based schools, and many of them are schools that are conservative leaning.
I mean, do you think of it as a conservative test?

jeremy tate

I think of it as a conservative test if you define conservative as thinking that
old things are really cool and really worth preserving. I think in that sense,
it’s conservative. But classical education is not inherently conservative, and I
have deep concerns that this movement could be hijacked in some ways or seen as
just for conservatives.

archived recording 1

Governor DeSantis continued his war of words with the College Board and their
course materials.

archived recording (ron desantis)

It’s kind of with the College Board, who elected them? Are there other people
that provide services? It turns out, there are.

lulu garcia-navarro

That’s after the break.

So Jeremy, you say it’s not a conservative test, that you’re worried that it
gets hijacked politically, but it certainly has become a favorite among
conservative politicians. Like you, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has also
publicly been at odds with the College Board.

jeremy tate

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

Earlier this year, he blocked its AP African-American studies course from being
rolled out in the state. And then soon after, top state officials met with you
to discuss adopting your test as an alternative admissions exam for state
schools in Florida. Can you tell me how you found out that they were interested
in the test?

jeremy tate

Sure. And I’d be limited for what I can and can’t say right now with our
relationship with Florida. But of course, it is public knowledge right now that
CLT is in legislation, which will tie CLT scores to the Bright Future
Scholarship in Florida, and the idea there is to kind of keep great minds in
Florida. But there are people within his administration that send their own kids
to classical schools. Florida was ranked number one by the Heritage Foundation
for education freedom. There’s a ton of classical charter schools down there, a
lot of homeschooling families. And then it got more serious as there was this
idea of introducing CLT into legislation, which has been really well received.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, that must feel exciting.

jeremy tate

It is. But I do have concerns that let’s say the legislation goes through in
Florida, which I’m very excited about, that other states, that Texas, South
Carolina, Arkansas, states that are clearly conservative states, that they use
CLT and they adopt CLT, and then suddenly, CLT is just the red state test, and
then it just splits American education in that way, that there is kind of red
test and blue test. I don’t think that’s good. I don’t think it’s good if the
classical movement as a whole is seen and perceived as something that is just
for conservatives. And so I personally am determined to do everything I possibly
can to try to make the case that this is the kind of education that really is
for all people. It’s not for just conservatives or for liberals, but it’s an
education of what it means to be human.

lulu garcia-navarro

Jeremy, I appreciate you saying that your fear is that it’ll become a red state
test and it will split education in half. But you told the “Washington
Examiner,” and I’m quoting here, “the College Board is a radical, left-wing
institution.” And you went on to say that students are not leaving an AP US
history class saying, I love America. They’re seeing America as the oppressor,
as the big, bad guy. I mean, is that how you see it?

jeremy tate

I do see the College Board as politically biased. I mean, there’s no question
about that, and I think at times, pretty heavy handed. An education that’s
focused on the here and now is inherently going to lend itself to being
political in a way, whereas an education that’s focused on antiquity, what our
ancestors cared about, texts that have proven to be timeless — I think Aristotle
is going to be relevant in 500 years in ways that contemporary texts are not
going to be relevant in 500 years. These texts that have staying power, I think
that that makes it inherently less political. So CLT does not want to be a
conservative option to a politically biased College Board. We want to be an
apolitical option to a politically biased College Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

But I mean, that quote — I mean, that is an inherently political quote. You are
discussing things in political terms when you discuss education.

jeremy tate

I think this is — I think students who are given a good education in any
classroom in America should graduate with a deep, deep gratitude for the country
that we live in with all of its warts. I don’t want to whitewash history. I
don’t want a wart-free education. Again, it’s got to be an education that is
warts and all, all the good stuff and all the bad stuff.

lulu garcia-navarro

The classic learning test isn’t the only way that classical education has come
up in Florida. Governor DeSantis also pointed out a number of classical
education proponents to the board of New College. That’s the small, public
liberal arts school in Florida that’s been at the center of some controversy.
His chief of staff said the hope was to make New College more like Hillsdale,
and that’s a classical Christian school. From your perspective as a proponent of
classical education, do you think that’s the right goal?

jeremy tate

I think Hillsdale is an incredible college. And actually, about a third of my
staff here at CLT are Hillsdale graduates. My understanding is they did not go
in and fire people, faculty, left and right. that they want to have a college
that has really thoughtful people that would better reflect the whole political
spectrum rather than just a tiny sliver of the political spectrum.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, they did fire the president. Hillsdale, though, is a private Christian
college. New College is a public college. Do you see any issue with a public
college being modeled after a Christian institution? I mean, should we all be
subjected to a religious education?

jeremy tate

Most colleges now have gone to this a la carte model. Take whatever you want.
You don’t want to take a language, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to take
philosophy, you don’t have to. I think that’s a real recipe for disaster. So I
do like what they’re doing at New College. You know, I understand folks like
Chris Rufo — Chris Rufo has got a big platform. He’s hit hard in terms of the
DEI and the CRT.

And you put Chris on the board, it’s going to have a big impact in terms of
public perception, in terms of what they’re doing at New College. But when I’ve
chatted with them and looked under the hood, and I think that it is totally, 100
percent in line with the founding mission of the college.

lulu garcia-navarro

Jeremy, you keep on talking about the style of teaching when I’m asking you
about the intent of some of these changes. And as you mentioned, one of the
board members at New College is Christopher Rufo, who is also on your board for
your company. And he initiated the national campaign against teaching students
about structural racism. And Rufo said after his appointment that he wants New
College to be — and I’m quoting here — “an alternative for conservative families
in the state of Florida.” I mean, that seems like a pretty explicit call for a
partisan education. I mean, you say you don’t want classical education to be
partisan, but then I’m wondering how you square that with having someone like
Rufo on your own board?

jeremy tate

Yeah. And we had a number of folks that were concerned about that move, even
internally. And again, CLT takes flak from a lot of conservative folks saying
that we’re woke and that we’ve got people on our board that shouldn’t be there
because they’re woke. To be on the CLT board, what we’re looking for is a shared
vision for education. If you believe that education is fundamentally about the
forming, the shaping, the molding of the human person, to love what is true,
good, and beautiful, then you’re fully qualified to be on our board.

Now if you’re a Marxist like Cornel West, you’re still totally qualified. And
Cornel West has been a friend, and he’s on our board. If you’re a hard hitting
conservative like Christopher Rufo, you’re still qualified.

lulu garcia-navarro

Cornel West is, of course, the Black philosopher who’s taught at Harvard
University and is a professor emeritus at Princeton University.

I’ve been listening to you talk, and most of the supporters of a classical
education are conservative. And if classical learning is being championed by one
side in this war that we’re having over education and how our children should be
educated and what they should be learning, doesn’t that undermine the idea that
you’ve been talking about, that your approach sidesteps ideology?

jeremy tate

I don’t see it that way at all. I don’t see — I think what mainstream education
has become, this ripping apart of character formation from knowledge. I mean,
our mission, our mission statement at CLT is reconnecting knowledge and virtue
through meaningful assessments and connections to seekers of truth, goodness,
and beauty. When we say reconnect, because our understanding is that this
unnatural separation of virtue, character education, and knowledge is new.

And Lulu, I would even argue a step further that it’s a national security
threat. It’s a risk to have — and I love STEM. I love math and science. But to
totally divorce technology from ethics is dangerous, right? You have to have — I
think about the great quote from “Jurassic Park,” right? They never stopped to
ask, should we do this? They were obsessed with, can we do this? And they did
it, and it resulted in disaster because they never stopped to say, well, should
we do this. That ethical question, if we get away from that, if we continue to
move away from that, there’s going to be horrific downstream consequences.

lulu garcia-navarro

I want to dig in here because you said you want to reunite knowledge and virtue,
but that’s complicated because who gets to define virtue? I mean, when we
started this conversation, you talked about the nature of good, how to create a
moral compass. Who gets to weigh in on those questions?

jeremy tate

I think our ancestors should have a seat at the table at the very least in terms
of defining what is virtue. And of course, if you read any of Aristotle, virtue
is very, very hard to define. Aristotle in many ways understands it as a balance
between extremes. I think you’d be really hard-pressed to find people to say,
no, we should not have just society. They may debate about what justice is, and
that’s a great debate to have. At least we’re talking about justice.

But what I have found is that, in some ways, it’s a straw man argument that
people don’t agree on virtue. I think there are some virtues, maybe if we talk
about Christian sexual ethics or something, that people can have a big range of
debate about. But again, things like kindness, generosity, courage, patience,
humility even, I think those are pretty universal, right? I think it’s
consistently — go anywhere on the globe and go to the most remote African tribe
or Pacific island where they’ve had no contact with any of the civilized world,
you’re still not going to find there —

lulu garcia-navarro

Jeremy, I don’t think anyone is going to argue that murder is bad, stealing is
bad, being cruel to people is bad. I think what gets tricky is, of course, some
of these gray areas where there is debate. And I’m just wondering if you’re OK
with the debate over the controversial stuff, sexual ethics, happening in
schools?

jeremy tate

It’s a great question. I think with something like sexuality, I think if there
are options for parents, then absolutely, right? I think if you want to have a
school that teaches whatever — I mean, if parents have the options for where
they send their children, my kids go to a Catholic school, and they teach them
the Catholic understanding of sexuality. I think that’s great. Not everybody’s
Catholic. Not every child should be going to a Catholic school. So I’d say,
yeah, I am totally good with sexuality being taught in school so long as parents
have a choice.

lulu garcia-navarro

Public schools?

jeremy tate

Sure, yeah, so long as parents have a choice for where. I mean, it wasn’t long
ago. It was, what, 15 years ago where in public schools, even, abstinence was
taught as the main thing, right? I mean, that was a good thing instead of just
safe sex. And so I think we should absolutely have a debate about what we’re
teaching in public schools, why we’re teaching it and in all schools.

lulu garcia-navarro

Let me ask you this. A criticism of classical education that I’ve read is that
it focuses on the Western canon, which is largely made up of white men. A senior
official in Florida’s Education Department tweeted recently about your test, CLT
not CRT, referring, of course, to critical race theory. And so I am wondering if
you think it’s a problem, for example, to discuss race in the classroom?

jeremy tate

The president of our board, Angel Adams Parham, she is a heavyweight. She’s the
author of “The Black Intellectual Tradition,” a Black PhD, went as a professor
at the University of Virginia, a Yale undergrad. And she teaches and she has for
a long time. She teaches on intersectionality, on critical race theory. And so I
would respectfully disagree, even with Ron DeSantis, that I believe in freedom
and education, and I believe in freedom of speech as well.

And so I think it can be dangerous when folks on the political right want to
censor or put heavy handed — using the power of the state — heavy-handed limits
on what can and cannot be taught in various schools. Now, that’s also assuming
that we can have school choice. If parents have no option, they have to send
their kid to this school because of their zip code, they should have options to
not have that. There should be choice.

lulu garcia-navarro

One thing I noticed in the authors on the CLT list is that there really isn’t
any contemporary work of any sort. You’re very pure to the name, which means
that a whole range of realities, experiences that students are living through,
changes in technology, climate change, culture, aren’t reflected in the texts.

jeremy tate

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

Do you think there’s any room for education as you hope it to be that is more
forward-looking and that can embrace culture as it changes? Because I’ve thought
about what is lost for students, given how rapidly the world is changing, if
their reality is not reflected in the things that they’re studying. I mean, why
not a mix?

jeremy tate

So 2/3 of all of the passages we put in front of students come from this author
bank. But there’s still the other third. And in fact, the amount of flack I’ve
received over the past seven years — if you go to the CLT website and you look
at the practice test, one of the passages, one of the contemporary passages —
which we always have a contemporary passage — one of those is from Susan Rice.

Now Susan Rice is an Obama appointee. And we’ve had conservatives say, why do
you have Susan Rice on your practice test? She’s not a conservative. She’s an
Obama appointee, and this, that, and the other. And I say, look, I’m not saying
you have to agree with CS Lewis. I’m not saying you have to agree with Susan
Rice. But the ability to read something and understand it without having a
meltdown, that was a mark of an educated mind for a long time, right, to be able
to read something you don’t agree with and still understand it. And that’s why,
again, we’ve had people unhappy that we put Nietzsche on the test, we put Darwin
on the test.

But the problem, I think, Lulu, is that you don’t know if something has staying
power until probably at least 50 years or so. And that is really at the heart
and soul of what makes a classic a classic, right? You think about the stories
that all of us know. I mean, everybody tends to the tortoise and the hare. That
story is from “Aesop’s Fables,” and I think the canon, as it evolves, is going
to look more and more diverse.

But I think what’s hard to do is to go back and say, well, we shouldn’t read
Dante and Shakespeare and Augustine and Aristotle because they’re all white men,
which isn’t even really true.

lulu garcia-navarro

I think the critique is we shouldn’t read them — I think the critique is we
shouldn’t read them exclusively and without context. And one of the real deep
concerns about having a canon that really elevates white men is that it plays
into a very modern ill, which is white supremacy and white nationalism, and
classical education has been used by people who support those corrosive
ideologies as proof that actually, white men and white people and white history
are the most important standard bearers of what is right and true and good.

jeremy tate

Yeah, I could not agree more with you, Lulu, that classical education has
absolutely been misused at times, for sure. I would not argue with that for a
second. And you know, what’s interesting to me is that the — again, when I think
about Cornel West, he speaks about the unique contribution of Athens and
Jerusalem. Well, Athens and Jerusalem, those are not — we’re not talking about
Scandinavia. There was not the white men concept that there is now 2,000 years
ago. And in fact —

lulu garcia-navarro

But that’s precisely my point. These concepts do exist today.

jeremy tate

Yeah, I mean the president of our board is a heavyweight, intellectual,
African-American woman. And she is deeply passionate about this kind of
education and is a huge believer in CLT. And the way she put it to me one time,
she said, Jeremy, I realize, I went all the way from kindergarten through my PhD
at the top colleges, and I had never read Homer at all. And she saw that as a
problem.

Some people see this as a right-wing conservative movement, and it is not. It is
not. And I don’t want it to be that. It is a movement — it is a kind of
education that is a deep dive into what it means to be fully human. Has it been
abused? Absolutely. Absolutely. But because it’s been abused is not a good
reason to say kids shouldn’t read “The Odyssey,” they shouldn’t read “The
Iliad,” they shouldn’t read Shakespeare. Because people — every good thing —
every good thing — sex, alcohol, has been profoundly misused.

That is what — I’m a Christian, so I believe in a fallen human nature. And so if
in a fallen world where humans do bad things and have an immense capacity for
both good and evil, every good thing is going to be misused. Classical
education, the great books are good, but they’ve been misused at times. I’m not
going to disagree with you at all on that. I think you’re right.

lulu garcia-navarro

What’s next for CLT? Will you try to rival the AP as well? I mean, that’s what
seems like a lot of the most politicized conversations are happening.

jeremy tate

We get that question a lot in terms of challenging AP. And I think eventually,
that’s probably not in the picture for the next two or three years. What we have
introduced right now actually is lower grade testing, grades three, four, five,
and six, and the demand for that has been overwhelming in terms of the lower
grade testing.

And again, I think every parent, I think, wants this kind of education. They
want an education that is big on great, timeless stories. I mean, you think of
stories like the “Beauty and the Beast” or “Cinderella.” These are stories that
we don’t even know the origins, but somehow they were just so good that every
generation passed it down to the next generation, and so that’s what we want to
be doing on the lower grade side as well.

lulu garcia-navarro

“Cinderella.” Jeremy Wayne Tate, thank you very much.

jeremy tate

Lulu, thank you for having me.

[MUSIC]

lulu garcia-navarro

“First Person” is a production of New York Times Opinion. Tell us what you
thought of this episode. Our email is firstperson@nytimes.com. This episode was
produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Kaari
Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero,
Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact checking by Mary Marge Locker. The rest
of the “First Person” team includes Anabel Bacon, Olivia Natt, Wyatt Orme, Derek
Arthur and Jillian Weinberger. Special Thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Shannon
Busta, Allison Benedikt, Annie-Rose Strasser and Katie Kingsbury.


First Person
May 4, 2023


WHY CONSERVATIVES CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT ARISTOTLE


THE 2,500-YEAR-OLD ROOTS OF RON DESANTIS’S EDUCATION PLAN.

Transcript
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Back to First Person
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transcript


WHY CONSERVATIVES CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT ARISTOTLE

THE 2,500-YEAR-OLD ROOTS OF RON DESANTIS’S EDUCATION PLAN.

Thursday, May 4th, 2023

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been
reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode
audio before quoting from this transcript and emailtranscripts@nytimes.comwith
any questions.

lulu garcia-navarro

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and this is “First
Person.” Maybe you’ve heard the term classical education. It’s an old idea
that’s newly in favor, especially among conservatives. The organizing principle
is that education should be rooted in the Western canon, the great books of the
Western world, usually starting with the ancient Greeks.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has championed classical education. In
Tennessee last year, Governor Bill Lee threw his weight behind opening a network
of classical charter schools in partnership with Hillsdale, a conservative
Christian college. And it’s all caught the attention of Fox News, which ran an
entire series recently about the educational model.

Jeremy Wayne Tate is a key player in classical education’s revival. He was a
teacher and also attended seminary before starting a company called The Classic
Learning Test, which offers an alternative to the College Board’s SAT. Florida
is considering adopting the CLT as an alternate admissions exam for state
schools. That could give the test much greater reach and potentially change
public education across the country. Today on “First Person,” Jeremy Wayne Tate
looks to the past for the future of American education.

Jeremy, today you run a testing company, but I understand that you started your
career in the classroom. Can you tell me about your first teaching job?

jeremy tate

Sure. I taught at Progress High School in Brooklyn, New York. If you go down the
L train, it’s off the Grand Street stop on the L train. And I taught there for
three years. This is a school that was serving a population, 100 percent
minority students. It was a community that had had a lot of struggles. There was
a lot of suffering and a lot of pain. The experience there was profound in
shaping my views on education.

lulu garcia-navarro

Well, I mean, take me into that classroom. I mean, what was it like?

jeremy tate

Yeah, so engagement was the challenge. And so the students that were often
involved in gang activity, drug activity. And we’ve got a lesson on the
Federalists and the anti-Federalists. Where do you even begin to try to make
this engaging to them? As a rule, 90 percent of them were bored out of their
minds. They were not dialed in. They didn’t have an understanding of why school
should matter or why they cared to learn.

And as I reflected on that, I thought a lot about my own experience. I actually
kind of hated school growing up. I was bored out of my mind K through junior
year in high school. And I actually started reading as a senior in high school
CS Lewis, and it was an introduction to a whole new world of why questions about
the big things in life. But what it did was that I was suddenly interested in
every subject as well and suddenly started to do very well in school. But that
didn’t happen until it was first introduced to these bigger questions about what
is human happiness, what is the good life, is there a God, does God exist. So I
think these questions are crucial for students to become engaged.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you’re not seeing a lot of engagement from students, which you understand
from your own experience. Where did that thought lead you?

jeremy tate

So even when I was teaching in New York, I was starting at Westminster Seminary
in Philadelphia. And it wasn’t ever the intention of any course, but I became
really obsessed with this question, which may sound so basic, of literally just
what is education?

lulu garcia-navarro

So you were teaching and going to seminary at the same time, so there was this
kind of cross-pollination happening?

jeremy tate

That’s right. But it occurred to me, just thinking about my teaching experience,
that for nearly every other generation, what they were trying to do in this big,
huge project of education, the main thing they were going after was human
formation. It was the shaping of the person, maybe even moreso than what they
were learning. The idea was that you’re cultivating virtue.

The other thing they seem to be doing — and this is cross-cultural — is passing
down kind of this treasury of knowledge. And I really had this moment at a bat
mitzvah — and I’ve only been to a couple of bat mitzvahs. It was my daughter’s
friend. And she was this little tiny girl, and she was being physically handed
by her parents the Torah. And it was massive. And it was kind of funny because
you could hardly see the little girl when they handed it to her. But I saw that,
and I was like, that’s it. That is what education is. It’s this passing down
what is most important from one generation to the next and also about the
shaping to pass down the values that the community holds most dear.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

lulu garcia-navarro

How did you start to think about that in practical terms in the classroom? I
mean, what did you change?

jeremy tate

Yeah, it’s a great question and a really tough question because my experience at
the time was an experience of becoming very skeptical, actually, about public
education as it’s currently being offered and experience in the United States.
So it was growing skepticism for what we were doing.

And it was also meeting more and more students who are being homeschooled,
students coming out of classical Christian schools, classical charter schools,
and seeing — in no way is this intended to bash public school families. I went
to public school, again, taught in public schools for years. But I noticed
something really different, a consistency in terms of maturity, thoughtfulness
that was a reflection of the education they were receiving.

lulu garcia-navarro

And so what did you do? I mean, did you stay in the public school system?

jeremy tate

I didn’t, no. I was also a convert in 2010 to Catholicism, which was kind of
funny because I went to a seminary that was very, fairly anti-Catholic. And so I
wanted to get into an authentically, faithfully Catholic school, and I
discovered that school in 2014, Mount de Sales Academy. And my daughters go
there now. It’s in Catonsville, Maryland. And it’s run by these Dominican
sisters. We would call them the dancing Dominicans because they would literally
dance in the hallways. And it’s one of the few growing orders in the United
States. And so I’m talking full habit that they’re wearing, but many of them
were in their 20s. So got into that school in 2014.

lulu garcia-navarro

Did you see what you’d been imagining once you got to a Catholic school
environment? Did it fulfill your vision of moral formation?

jeremy tate

In so many ways, absolutely, yes, just even the students seeing the life of
these Dominican sisters. And so they take a vow of poverty, chastity, and
obedience. And you can believe conceptually, like, people can have a vow of
poverty and still be happy. But when you actually see them living with such joy
every day, consistently, it has a profoundly shaping influence.

I would make one kind of exception, and this is a big part of my story is I felt
like when I got to Mount de Sales that there was a tension that was really
noticeable with this vision for education that these Dominican sisters had with
the College Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

The College Board, the not-for-profit behind the SAT and advanced placement, AP
courses among other things?

jeremy tate

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

And it was really — what was really noticeable?

jeremy tate

The influence of the College Board. And the way that this really came home for
me, and I think this was — I won’t forget this. The sisters, they introduced a
class, an intro to philosophy. And it was an elective, and hardly any students
signed up for it. And I was talking to students, saying, why didn’t you want to
take the philosophy class? I mean, these are the great questions in life. What
is happiness? What is the good life? How does God want me to live? Is there a
God? These are the greatest questions that any human ought to be asking.

And I remember students saying, well, there’s no AP points. I’m not going to get
the five AP points with this. And I remember thinking, what in the world? We
can’t get our top students to take philosophy because it’s not five AP points?
And I think that was the beginning of this wild idea of well, maybe there needs
to be a competitor to the College Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

So you perceived the College Board really in some ways dictating what students
were learning and interested in learning?

jeremy tate

In a profound way. And it drove home to me this concept that the test itself is
a teacher. The tests teach. We’re taught, as education majors, to think about
testing primarily as an evaluative tool. And I started to think, wait a minute,
maybe it’s not mostly even evaluative. Maybe it’s more pedagogical. I think it’s
maybe literally one of the few ideas in education that almost everybody agrees
with, that the test ends up driving the curriculum.

lulu garcia-navarro

Well, explain to me exactly what you saw is wrong about teachers teaching to the
College Board standards. I mean, they test math and reading and writing. I mean,
what did you see as flawed in the College Board’s approach?

jeremy tate

Yeah, I think it was twofold. I mean, it was what the College Board was leaving
off of the test and then I think some of what was being on the test as well. And
the College Board a couple of years ago, you know, Bernie Sanders was on the
SAT. I think it’s unlikely they would have — I don’t know — Ted Cruz or some
conservative.

And so I think that there is more and more people seeing a political bias from
the College Board, maybe more reflected in AP US history and AP European
history. They would leave the AP European history class and have a very negative
view of the church’s contribution to culture and society, rather than a more
nuanced view. And we wouldn’t have hospitals. We wouldn’t have universities. We
wouldn’t have orphanages. These were all things that the Catholic Church brought
to the world in medieval Christendom. I feel like they were not telling that
story, the College Board, and more and more parents and teachers were becoming
concerned about the influence and the clear political agenda behind the College
Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, what I’m hearing you say is that you would have liked to have seen more
reference to and celebration of the Catholic Church’s role, but most people
aren’t Catholic.

jeremy tate

Yeah. Most people aren’t Catholic. But I think just to take just the university
itself, the concept of a university really was distinctly a concept, an idea,
kind of born out of medieval Christendom. So it doesn’t mean somebody needs to
convert to Roman Catholicism. But I think to have a decent sense of what is a
university and where did it come from, somebody should be aware of that history.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, the Catholic Church was vital in establishing, as you say, the earliest
universities in Europe around the 12th century, and eventually it established
some in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries, including my alma mater,
Georgetown University.

But I’m just wondering about, why not include, then, the influence of Eastern
traditions, say in China, which have been credited for setting up the earliest
systems of education or the influence of Islam and those first higher education
institutions that they set up in what became the model for universities in
Europe? I mean, I guess the question is, where do you start the clock?

jeremy tate

I think in America, I mean, given that we’re founded and initially the influence
of all things English, especially in the early days and in system of government,
I think for students to have a good understanding of our system of government,
where it comes from, I do think that there should be an emphasis. I think it has
been a bit of one of the downsides of the multicultural approach is that
students get a lot of everything but not any real substance of anything. And I
don’t think you can deeply appreciate any culture unless you have some culture
to call your own.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

lulu garcia-navarro

So eventually in response to the problems you saw with the College Board and the
SAT, you decided to create an alternative test, The Classic Learning Test. Let’s
talk about classical learning or classical education for people who may not know
what it is. How do you define it?

jeremy tate

I’ve been in rooms with all the greatest minds that are in this movement that we
call the classical renewal movement, or some people say the recovery movement.
And it’s really, really hard to define because it is so big. So I think the main
difference is what we would call the telos or the goal. What is the goal of
education?

Is the goal of education, fundamentally, to have worker bees in a factory, which
in some ways I think is the origins of the compulsory education system we have
right now? Or is the goal of education the formation of the whole human person
to love what is good and to not love what is not good or what is evil? And I
think the latter definition kind of defines or gets at the very heart of what
classical education is about.

And then I think it’s also defined by, again, this kind of treasury that’s being
passed down. We’re passing down the great treasure trove of what you may call
the canon, these great luminaries that have — really, it’s often quoted Matthew
Arnold as saying “the very best of what has been thought and said.” That is the
heart and soul of a classical education.

lulu garcia-navarro

How is the philosophy of your test different from the SAT? What are you testing
for?

jeremy tate

Yeah, again, so born out of this concept that the test ends up driving the
curriculum, CLT has what we call an author bank. And the author bank has about
200 authors, and 2/3 of everything that we put in front of students is going to
come from this author bank. So students taking the CLT, what are they going to
see that they would never see on an SAT or ACT?

Well, we’ve had passages from Charles Darwin on the CLT. We’ve had passages from
CS Lewis. We’ve had passages from Dante. We’ve had passages from Flannery
O’Connor or Catherine of Siena. So I think for a student receiving a homeschool
education or a classical school or a Catholic school, actually, even just public
school students who maybe enjoy reading on their own, the CLT is a better tool,
we would argue, to kind of showcase their academic ability.

lulu garcia-navarro

Given that this test came out of seeing a disconnect between what was being
taught at your previous Catholic school and the moral education you envisioned,
because in your telling of the College Board’s influence, were you primarily
thinking of the audience for this test as religious institutions initially?

jeremy tate

Not necessarily. I think the early enthusiasts of CLT, I think, ended up having
a big impact on what you’d call brand perception or kind of reputation. And so
these were schools like Saint Thomas Aquinas College in California or
Christendom College in Front Royal Virginia. But we have always wanted every
college, every four year college in the country, to use the CLT as an admission
standard.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, as you’ve said, though, many of the early adopters of the test were
faith-based schools, and many of them are schools that are conservative leaning.
I mean, do you think of it as a conservative test?

jeremy tate

I think of it as a conservative test if you define conservative as thinking that
old things are really cool and really worth preserving. I think in that sense,
it’s conservative. But classical education is not inherently conservative, and I
have deep concerns that this movement could be hijacked in some ways or seen as
just for conservatives.

archived recording 1

Governor DeSantis continued his war of words with the College Board and their
course materials.

archived recording (ron desantis)

It’s kind of with the College Board, who elected them? Are there other people
that provide services? It turns out, there are.

lulu garcia-navarro

That’s after the break.

So Jeremy, you say it’s not a conservative test, that you’re worried that it
gets hijacked politically, but it certainly has become a favorite among
conservative politicians. Like you, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has also
publicly been at odds with the College Board.

jeremy tate

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

Earlier this year, he blocked its AP African-American studies course from being
rolled out in the state. And then soon after, top state officials met with you
to discuss adopting your test as an alternative admissions exam for state
schools in Florida. Can you tell me how you found out that they were interested
in the test?

jeremy tate

Sure. And I’d be limited for what I can and can’t say right now with our
relationship with Florida. But of course, it is public knowledge right now that
CLT is in legislation, which will tie CLT scores to the Bright Future
Scholarship in Florida, and the idea there is to kind of keep great minds in
Florida. But there are people within his administration that send their own kids
to classical schools. Florida was ranked number one by the Heritage Foundation
for education freedom. There’s a ton of classical charter schools down there, a
lot of homeschooling families. And then it got more serious as there was this
idea of introducing CLT into legislation, which has been really well received.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, that must feel exciting.

jeremy tate

It is. But I do have concerns that let’s say the legislation goes through in
Florida, which I’m very excited about, that other states, that Texas, South
Carolina, Arkansas, states that are clearly conservative states, that they use
CLT and they adopt CLT, and then suddenly, CLT is just the red state test, and
then it just splits American education in that way, that there is kind of red
test and blue test. I don’t think that’s good. I don’t think it’s good if the
classical movement as a whole is seen and perceived as something that is just
for conservatives. And so I personally am determined to do everything I possibly
can to try to make the case that this is the kind of education that really is
for all people. It’s not for just conservatives or for liberals, but it’s an
education of what it means to be human.

lulu garcia-navarro

Jeremy, I appreciate you saying that your fear is that it’ll become a red state
test and it will split education in half. But you told the “Washington
Examiner,” and I’m quoting here, “the College Board is a radical, left-wing
institution.” And you went on to say that students are not leaving an AP US
history class saying, I love America. They’re seeing America as the oppressor,
as the big, bad guy. I mean, is that how you see it?

jeremy tate

I do see the College Board as politically biased. I mean, there’s no question
about that, and I think at times, pretty heavy handed. An education that’s
focused on the here and now is inherently going to lend itself to being
political in a way, whereas an education that’s focused on antiquity, what our
ancestors cared about, texts that have proven to be timeless — I think Aristotle
is going to be relevant in 500 years in ways that contemporary texts are not
going to be relevant in 500 years. These texts that have staying power, I think
that that makes it inherently less political. So CLT does not want to be a
conservative option to a politically biased College Board. We want to be an
apolitical option to a politically biased College Board.

lulu garcia-navarro

But I mean, that quote — I mean, that is an inherently political quote. You are
discussing things in political terms when you discuss education.

jeremy tate

I think this is — I think students who are given a good education in any
classroom in America should graduate with a deep, deep gratitude for the country
that we live in with all of its warts. I don’t want to whitewash history. I
don’t want a wart-free education. Again, it’s got to be an education that is
warts and all, all the good stuff and all the bad stuff.

lulu garcia-navarro

The classic learning test isn’t the only way that classical education has come
up in Florida. Governor DeSantis also pointed out a number of classical
education proponents to the board of New College. That’s the small, public
liberal arts school in Florida that’s been at the center of some controversy.
His chief of staff said the hope was to make New College more like Hillsdale,
and that’s a classical Christian school. From your perspective as a proponent of
classical education, do you think that’s the right goal?

jeremy tate

I think Hillsdale is an incredible college. And actually, about a third of my
staff here at CLT are Hillsdale graduates. My understanding is they did not go
in and fire people, faculty, left and right. that they want to have a college
that has really thoughtful people that would better reflect the whole political
spectrum rather than just a tiny sliver of the political spectrum.

lulu garcia-navarro

I mean, they did fire the president. Hillsdale, though, is a private Christian
college. New College is a public college. Do you see any issue with a public
college being modeled after a Christian institution? I mean, should we all be
subjected to a religious education?

jeremy tate

Most colleges now have gone to this a la carte model. Take whatever you want.
You don’t want to take a language, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to take
philosophy, you don’t have to. I think that’s a real recipe for disaster. So I
do like what they’re doing at New College. You know, I understand folks like
Chris Rufo — Chris Rufo has got a big platform. He’s hit hard in terms of the
DEI and the CRT.

And you put Chris on the board, it’s going to have a big impact in terms of
public perception, in terms of what they’re doing at New College. But when I’ve
chatted with them and looked under the hood, and I think that it is totally, 100
percent in line with the founding mission of the college.

lulu garcia-navarro

Jeremy, you keep on talking about the style of teaching when I’m asking you
about the intent of some of these changes. And as you mentioned, one of the
board members at New College is Christopher Rufo, who is also on your board for
your company. And he initiated the national campaign against teaching students
about structural racism. And Rufo said after his appointment that he wants New
College to be — and I’m quoting here — “an alternative for conservative families
in the state of Florida.” I mean, that seems like a pretty explicit call for a
partisan education. I mean, you say you don’t want classical education to be
partisan, but then I’m wondering how you square that with having someone like
Rufo on your own board?

jeremy tate

Yeah. And we had a number of folks that were concerned about that move, even
internally. And again, CLT takes flak from a lot of conservative folks saying
that we’re woke and that we’ve got people on our board that shouldn’t be there
because they’re woke. To be on the CLT board, what we’re looking for is a shared
vision for education. If you believe that education is fundamentally about the
forming, the shaping, the molding of the human person, to love what is true,
good, and beautiful, then you’re fully qualified to be on our board.

Now if you’re a Marxist like Cornel West, you’re still totally qualified. And
Cornel West has been a friend, and he’s on our board. If you’re a hard hitting
conservative like Christopher Rufo, you’re still qualified.

lulu garcia-navarro

Cornel West is, of course, the Black philosopher who’s taught at Harvard
University and is a professor emeritus at Princeton University.

I’ve been listening to you talk, and most of the supporters of a classical
education are conservative. And if classical learning is being championed by one
side in this war that we’re having over education and how our children should be
educated and what they should be learning, doesn’t that undermine the idea that
you’ve been talking about, that your approach sidesteps ideology?

jeremy tate

I don’t see it that way at all. I don’t see — I think what mainstream education
has become, this ripping apart of character formation from knowledge. I mean,
our mission, our mission statement at CLT is reconnecting knowledge and virtue
through meaningful assessments and connections to seekers of truth, goodness,
and beauty. When we say reconnect, because our understanding is that this
unnatural separation of virtue, character education, and knowledge is new.

And Lulu, I would even argue a step further that it’s a national security
threat. It’s a risk to have — and I love STEM. I love math and science. But to
totally divorce technology from ethics is dangerous, right? You have to have — I
think about the great quote from “Jurassic Park,” right? They never stopped to
ask, should we do this? They were obsessed with, can we do this? And they did
it, and it resulted in disaster because they never stopped to say, well, should
we do this. That ethical question, if we get away from that, if we continue to
move away from that, there’s going to be horrific downstream consequences.

lulu garcia-navarro

I want to dig in here because you said you want to reunite knowledge and virtue,
but that’s complicated because who gets to define virtue? I mean, when we
started this conversation, you talked about the nature of good, how to create a
moral compass. Who gets to weigh in on those questions?

jeremy tate

I think our ancestors should have a seat at the table at the very least in terms
of defining what is virtue. And of course, if you read any of Aristotle, virtue
is very, very hard to define. Aristotle in many ways understands it as a balance
between extremes. I think you’d be really hard-pressed to find people to say,
no, we should not have just society. They may debate about what justice is, and
that’s a great debate to have. At least we’re talking about justice.

But what I have found is that, in some ways, it’s a straw man argument that
people don’t agree on virtue. I think there are some virtues, maybe if we talk
about Christian sexual ethics or something, that people can have a big range of
debate about. But again, things like kindness, generosity, courage, patience,
humility even, I think those are pretty universal, right? I think it’s
consistently — go anywhere on the globe and go to the most remote African tribe
or Pacific island where they’ve had no contact with any of the civilized world,
you’re still not going to find there —

lulu garcia-navarro

Jeremy, I don’t think anyone is going to argue that murder is bad, stealing is
bad, being cruel to people is bad. I think what gets tricky is, of course, some
of these gray areas where there is debate. And I’m just wondering if you’re OK
with the debate over the controversial stuff, sexual ethics, happening in
schools?

jeremy tate

It’s a great question. I think with something like sexuality, I think if there
are options for parents, then absolutely, right? I think if you want to have a
school that teaches whatever — I mean, if parents have the options for where
they send their children, my kids go to a Catholic school, and they teach them
the Catholic understanding of sexuality. I think that’s great. Not everybody’s
Catholic. Not every child should be going to a Catholic school. So I’d say,
yeah, I am totally good with sexuality being taught in school so long as parents
have a choice.

lulu garcia-navarro

Public schools?

jeremy tate

Sure, yeah, so long as parents have a choice for where. I mean, it wasn’t long
ago. It was, what, 15 years ago where in public schools, even, abstinence was
taught as the main thing, right? I mean, that was a good thing instead of just
safe sex. And so I think we should absolutely have a debate about what we’re
teaching in public schools, why we’re teaching it and in all schools.

lulu garcia-navarro

Let me ask you this. A criticism of classical education that I’ve read is that
it focuses on the Western canon, which is largely made up of white men. A senior
official in Florida’s Education Department tweeted recently about your test, CLT
not CRT, referring, of course, to critical race theory. And so I am wondering if
you think it’s a problem, for example, to discuss race in the classroom?

jeremy tate

The president of our board, Angel Adams Parham, she is a heavyweight. She’s the
author of “The Black Intellectual Tradition,” a Black PhD, went as a professor
at the University of Virginia, a Yale undergrad. And she teaches and she has for
a long time. She teaches on intersectionality, on critical race theory. And so I
would respectfully disagree, even with Ron DeSantis, that I believe in freedom
and education, and I believe in freedom of speech as well.

And so I think it can be dangerous when folks on the political right want to
censor or put heavy handed — using the power of the state — heavy-handed limits
on what can and cannot be taught in various schools. Now, that’s also assuming
that we can have school choice. If parents have no option, they have to send
their kid to this school because of their zip code, they should have options to
not have that. There should be choice.

lulu garcia-navarro

One thing I noticed in the authors on the CLT list is that there really isn’t
any contemporary work of any sort. You’re very pure to the name, which means
that a whole range of realities, experiences that students are living through,
changes in technology, climate change, culture, aren’t reflected in the texts.

jeremy tate

Yeah.

lulu garcia-navarro

Do you think there’s any room for education as you hope it to be that is more
forward-looking and that can embrace culture as it changes? Because I’ve thought
about what is lost for students, given how rapidly the world is changing, if
their reality is not reflected in the things that they’re studying. I mean, why
not a mix?

jeremy tate

So 2/3 of all of the passages we put in front of students come from this author
bank. But there’s still the other third. And in fact, the amount of flack I’ve
received over the past seven years — if you go to the CLT website and you look
at the practice test, one of the passages, one of the contemporary passages —
which we always have a contemporary passage — one of those is from Susan Rice.

Now Susan Rice is an Obama appointee. And we’ve had conservatives say, why do
you have Susan Rice on your practice test? She’s not a conservative. She’s an
Obama appointee, and this, that, and the other. And I say, look, I’m not saying
you have to agree with CS Lewis. I’m not saying you have to agree with Susan
Rice. But the ability to read something and understand it without having a
meltdown, that was a mark of an educated mind for a long time, right, to be able
to read something you don’t agree with and still understand it. And that’s why,
again, we’ve had people unhappy that we put Nietzsche on the test, we put Darwin
on the test.

But the problem, I think, Lulu, is that you don’t know if something has staying
power until probably at least 50 years or so. And that is really at the heart
and soul of what makes a classic a classic, right? You think about the stories
that all of us know. I mean, everybody tends to the tortoise and the hare. That
story is from “Aesop’s Fables,” and I think the canon, as it evolves, is going
to look more and more diverse.

But I think what’s hard to do is to go back and say, well, we shouldn’t read
Dante and Shakespeare and Augustine and Aristotle because they’re all white men,
which isn’t even really true.

lulu garcia-navarro

I think the critique is we shouldn’t read them — I think the critique is we
shouldn’t read them exclusively and without context. And one of the real deep
concerns about having a canon that really elevates white men is that it plays
into a very modern ill, which is white supremacy and white nationalism, and
classical education has been used by people who support those corrosive
ideologies as proof that actually, white men and white people and white history
are the most important standard bearers of what is right and true and good.

jeremy tate

Yeah, I could not agree more with you, Lulu, that classical education has
absolutely been misused at times, for sure. I would not argue with that for a
second. And you know, what’s interesting to me is that the — again, when I think
about Cornel West, he speaks about the unique contribution of Athens and
Jerusalem. Well, Athens and Jerusalem, those are not — we’re not talking about
Scandinavia. There was not the white men concept that there is now 2,000 years
ago. And in fact —

lulu garcia-navarro

But that’s precisely my point. These concepts do exist today.

jeremy tate

Yeah, I mean the president of our board is a heavyweight, intellectual,
African-American woman. And she is deeply passionate about this kind of
education and is a huge believer in CLT. And the way she put it to me one time,
she said, Jeremy, I realize, I went all the way from kindergarten through my PhD
at the top colleges, and I had never read Homer at all. And she saw that as a
problem.

Some people see this as a right-wing conservative movement, and it is not. It is
not. And I don’t want it to be that. It is a movement — it is a kind of
education that is a deep dive into what it means to be fully human. Has it been
abused? Absolutely. Absolutely. But because it’s been abused is not a good
reason to say kids shouldn’t read “The Odyssey,” they shouldn’t read “The
Iliad,” they shouldn’t read Shakespeare. Because people — every good thing —
every good thing — sex, alcohol, has been profoundly misused.

That is what — I’m a Christian, so I believe in a fallen human nature. And so if
in a fallen world where humans do bad things and have an immense capacity for
both good and evil, every good thing is going to be misused. Classical
education, the great books are good, but they’ve been misused at times. I’m not
going to disagree with you at all on that. I think you’re right.

lulu garcia-navarro

What’s next for CLT? Will you try to rival the AP as well? I mean, that’s what
seems like a lot of the most politicized conversations are happening.

jeremy tate

We get that question a lot in terms of challenging AP. And I think eventually,
that’s probably not in the picture for the next two or three years. What we have
introduced right now actually is lower grade testing, grades three, four, five,
and six, and the demand for that has been overwhelming in terms of the lower
grade testing.

And again, I think every parent, I think, wants this kind of education. They
want an education that is big on great, timeless stories. I mean, you think of
stories like the “Beauty and the Beast” or “Cinderella.” These are stories that
we don’t even know the origins, but somehow they were just so good that every
generation passed it down to the next generation, and so that’s what we want to
be doing on the lower grade side as well.

lulu garcia-navarro

“Cinderella.” Jeremy Wayne Tate, thank you very much.

jeremy tate

Lulu, thank you for having me.

[MUSIC]

lulu garcia-navarro

“First Person” is a production of New York Times Opinion. Tell us what you
thought of this episode. Our email is firstperson@nytimes.com. This episode was
produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Kaari
Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero,
Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact checking by Mary Marge Locker. The rest
of the “First Person” team includes Anabel Bacon, Olivia Natt, Wyatt Orme, Derek
Arthur and Jillian Weinberger. Special Thanks to Kristina Samulewski, Shannon
Busta, Allison Benedikt, Annie-Rose Strasser and Katie Kingsbury.

Listen 41:09



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Republican-led legislatures have recently made it clear what they don’t want
taught in public school classrooms: sexuality, gender identity, structural
racism. But when it comes to what they do want, one approach frequently arises:
classical education. The central tenet of classical education is that students
should focus on the Western canon, usually starting with the ancient Greeks. In
Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he is hoping to make changes to the state’s
institutions of higher education by “aligning core curriculum to the values of
liberty and the Western tradition.” In many other states, classical charter
schools are gaining popularity among conservative institutions like Hillsdale, a
classical Christian college.

Jeremy Wayne Tate is helping to drive classical education’s revival. In 2015 he
founded a company that developed the Classic Learning Test, or C.L.T., as an
alternative to the College Board’s SAT. Today it’s accepted at more than 200
predominantly faith-based schools. This week the Florida legislature passed a
bill that would make the C.L.T. an alternate admissions test for public
universities in that state, which could give the exam a foothold against more
mainstream options — and potentially change public education across the country.



(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times
website.)


Image
Credit...Ariel Skelley/Getty Images



Thoughts? Email us at firstperson@nytimes.com. Follow Lulu Garcia-Navarro on
Twitter: @lourdesgnavarro

“First Person” was produced this week by Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by
Stephanie Joyce and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by
Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker, Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by
Mary Marge Locker. The “First Person” team also includes Anabel Bacon, Olivia
Natt, Wyatt Orme, Derek Arthur and Jillian Weinberger. Special thanks to
Kristina Samulewski, Shannon Busta, Allison Benedikt, Annie-Rose Strasser and
Katie Kingsbury.







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