On this episode of the Bespoke Parenting Hour, host Julie Gunlock talks to Jeremy Tate, Founder and CEO of the Classical Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT/ACT and PSAT. Julie and Jeremy discuss this alternative test, why it’s necessary, and why it’s challenging the powerful influence of the mainstream testing establishment. They also discuss classical education — what it is, why it’s different from mainstream education, and why classical education — unlike progressive secular education — endeavors to pass down the best of what’s been thought and said for thousands of years.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to the program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom-tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves, and most importantly, their kids.
Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Jeremy Tate. He is the Founder and CEO of the Classical Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT, ACT, and PSAT. The CLT launched in 2015, with the aim of challenging the powerful influence of the mainstream testing establishment. As testing drives curriculum in education, the CLT aims to put students in front of the timeless texts that shaped the thinking of America’s founders.
Jeremy is also the host of the Anchored podcast. Prior to founding CLT, Jeremy served as Director of College Counseling at Mount de Sales Academy. Jeremy and his wife, Erin, reside in Annapolis, Maryland with their six children, which is great. Hey Jeremy, thanks so much for coming on.
Jeremy Tate:
Hey, Julie, thanks so much for having me.
Julie Gunlock:
Well, I have followed you for a lot of years on Twitter, and at the end of this, I’ll ask you to give your Twitter account, but I do encourage everyone to listen or to follow you on Twitter because you really give an interesting perspective on education. And really, today you are sort of the alternative in education, and I want to get into that a little bit too.
But my first question, and I think this is important for people who listen, who might not really be in the education world or deeply steeped in this world and the academics of it. So what is classical education?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, Julie. Thanks so much for having me. And that’s a great question to start off with. What is classical education? I would describe it as one, education really as it always was until the end of the 19th century or even the beginning of the 20th century.
And so the idea with education was two things: they were transmitting a body of knowledge, the best of what had been thought and said, and they were doing that with the purpose of the cultivation of virtue.
You see this from Aristotle all the way down, that the purpose of education was really to… I love the Plato quote actually, to teach people to love what is beautiful. And I didn’t hear that until I had been through an education major at Louisiana State, until I had spent 10 years in the classroom and stumbled into classical education circles.
And I hear this focus on beauty, on truth, on the cultivation of virtue, like the four cardinal virtues, and what really did it for me was actually meeting these young people. They were just different.
And in no way is that to bash any public school students. I met a ton of amazing families in the public school arena, but I feel like, for a lot of the most impressive students I met, they were actually getting at home what schools used to provide. The kind of discipline, the kind of moral formation, the kind of character development that I think every parent wants for their kids.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think this is a good way to segue to another question I have. I feel like, and I started off saying, you’re the alternative. It’s sad to say, but in some ways, classical education, sending your kids to a school that uses classical education, or homeschooling using this style of educating, is sort of new and sort of cutting edge. Right?
I feel like I certainly do that. I use a classical curriculum for my homeschooled child, and I specifically chose a classical private school for my other two. And I feel like I’m in the alternative section or style of education. But this is how it used to be, right?
You talk about this push for virtue and to be good and to teach people to be contributing parts of their community, people in their community. We can get into how education’s changed, but really, classical education used to be how everyone was educated in this country. Is that correct?
Jeremy Tate:
That is so well said. And in fact, that modifier, classical education, didn’t really start to be used until 40 or 50 years ago, at the very end of the 20th century. And really, I think what they were trying to do was to get back to referencing the kind of education that always was the case until about 100 years ago.
And what’s interesting to me, Julie, is it was never a decision that anybody made to break away from traditional education. In fact, education from the 4th century to the 15th century to the 18th century looked very much the same. And then there was this departure that happened, slowly enough to where people didn’t really know what was going on or see it happening. But if we look now at what eighth-graders were doing 100 years ago compared to today…
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Jeremy Tate:
It’s really, really different. And I think part of it is because we’re not focusing on cultivating virtue, the kind of habits, the kind of formation of the mind that young people really need.
Julie Gunlock:
What was that thing? You referenced about a hundred years ago, what was it? And again, I say this as someone who’s suddenly found myself in this education space, obviously like most people because of COVID. I had to make radical changes to my own family. I haven’t talked to you about this…I was a public school parent, through and through. My children have only gone to public schools, and now, we have really changed. And so I’m not an education scholar. I have really never studied the history of education in America. What was it that happened that changed it?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, I think it was a couple things. So one, that we would think sounds great, was compulsory education laws. Part of this was during the industrial revolution, there was a demand for more labor, especially the factory kind of labor. This often meant that women were leaving the house and were taking jobs in factories and that sort of thing.
And so you had compulsory education laws where you had limited resources. And so you have, 20, 25, 30 students in a class all of a sudden. It’s interesting now that our universities give teachers a Bachelor’s of Science. I think historically, education would’ve been an art. It was a craft. Teaching was a craft, and it’s got to be individualized and focused.
And it takes a lot of work when you’re working, so it became mass-produced and factory-style. We saw that with the industrial revolution. We got a bunch of goods and services, but everything became industrialized and made a bit like a factory.
That’s part of what happened. And so it became a least common denominator. Instead of having this rich transmission of the best that has been thought and said, it’s really difficult to mass-teach Latin or logic or rhetoric. And so these were kind of forgotten.
And I think, also, in place of it was part of the march of very progressive ideology, as well. That was a part of the 20th century.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. I feel like everything kind of blew up in the sixties in this country. And a lot of the social norms were sort of reversed or broken up or thought of as no longer appropriate.
Was education sort of a flash point in the sixties as well, where there were all these new education theories? And again, I’m really not in the education space as a career. That’s not the area where I work. And so it’s interesting to me, but I’m a mom. And so I hear about things like Common Core, right? So I know that this was a theory that got put into policy.
It’s funny that on Twitter, I’m actually following a whole bunch of people in the education space now because I’m actually much more curious about it. But I’ve heard things. There’s new theories on when kids should start reading. I know in Europe, they don’t really get kids reading until they’re much older. So were a lot of education theories, and breaking away from what was left of the classical model, occurring in the sixties and seventies?
Jeremy Tate:
I think it did. And what’s interesting is there wasn’t a self-consciousness or even awareness that “classical” was what we were doing, as you said a few weeks ago.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Jeremy Tate:
“Classical” is just what education was.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Jeremy Tate:
That’s all there was, and people understood it as a deep dive into this tradition. And so it’s interesting when you look at the most influential Americans from Frederick Douglass, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., they had an education that was rooted. King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail references Socrates multiple times.
Julie Gunlock:
Right.
Jeremy Tate:
And this also created a basis as well for common culture. And I think part of what has happened is that there’s been a well-intentioned — I do believe it’s well-intentioned — drive for multiculturalism. But that has also made people really hesitant to say we shouldn’t give students too much of the Western tradition. We should give students a little bit of everything.
But what it’s actually meant, for most students, is that they’re not getting a whole lot of anything.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s exactly right, yeah.
Jeremy Tate:
The strange part about that. Yeah, it’s so paradoxical, but the best way to appreciate America in some ways is to spend some time in another country, and you have a point of comparison.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Jeremy Tate:
And it’s the same way with classical education. When you do this time-traveling that so many young people are doing now with a classical education, they’re actually able to get a better sense of the present problems that we’re facing rather than if your whole education is only focused on the present.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s interesting. My colleague Inez Feltscher is an education scholar, and it’s funny how she talks when she talks about some of the education trends today being rather anti-American. She always says, “I don’t think these people have traveled much,” because if you do even a small amount of travel, and I think most people do a little bit of travel — it’s a wonderful experience to travel — but boy, you’re happy to get home.
And so I agree with you on that, but it is interesting that you said, “Classical education wasn’t really called that.” It’s not like in 1900 people were saying, “we have a classical style here.” So it’s interesting.
And I’m going to warn you, my dog is about to bark. So if you hear barking…
Jeremy Tate:
Oh, you have dogs there. Yeah.
Julie Gunlock:
I have a golden retriever who really feels she needs to protect me at all times.
But it’s interesting to me that when I described this — I had to talk to my parents about this — I wanted them to understand what was going on. And I said, “I’m excited. I picked out this classical curriculum for my oldest son.” And it’s interesting. He’s always been my reader. He loves to read. You can sit him down, and he’ll be happy if you just sit him down all day with a book. So it was perfect for him.
But when I was trying to describe it, I was using all this language that I’d read about. And then finally, I just said to my dad, “Dad, it’s kind of like how you were taught.”
Right? And he goes, “Oh.” He totally understood. I said, “Lots of memorization, lots of copy work.” I said, “And tons of reading of the Western canon.” And he really understood that.
And another example: I just want to share this because I think it’s an interesting story. When my son started the classical curriculum, and I was homeschooling with him, I went back a few grades and had him redo some subjects. And one of those was Language Arts. And I had him actually memorizing the grammar rules.
And I will tell you, Jeremy, I started to get really nervous about my kids’ education in their elementary years because I started to think, “aren’t they supposed to be memorizing these things?” And I noticed that they weren’t.
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah.
Julie Gunlock:
They didn’t know them. So when I had my son go back a few steps, a few grades, he reviewed a lot that first year that we were homeschooling. And he memorized all the grammar rules, and he was so proud of himself. And he said to me one day quietly, “You know, mom. You used to always buy us Mad Libs.” And I said, “Yeah, I know. And you guys would never pick them up and play with them.” And he goes, “Mom, I really wasn’t sure what an adjective was or what an adverb was.”
Because for those not familiar with Mad Libs, they are so fun. They just say, “put a noun in, put an adjective in,” and then you put in silly things, and pretty soon, your dog is walking your mom or something like that. It makes these crazy sentences because you just put a noun in or an adjective.
And he didn’t know. And he said, “I always felt like I should, but they weren’t teaching me that.”
And so now with classical education, again, the memorization, just memorizing grammar rules and memorizing different rules about language, he’s in a much better place. And that is, again, because of classical education, which again, is like what I described to my dad — how kids used to be taught.
Jeremy Tate:
Julie, I love that you shared that story. We’re actually new to it as well. I discovered it myself six or seven years ago.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Jeremy Tate:
And our kids have only been in classical schools now for about, I guess it’s their fourth or fifth year.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, okay.
Jeremy Tate:
But I think it’s some of the stories and the things that we’ve experienced as a family. And my boys, this year we took them from a classical homeschool model into a great brick and mortar school, Divine Mercy Academy. And the teachers have incredibly high standards for handwriting, for penmanship, for beautiful cursive. And my boys were banging their heads against the table. They didn’t want to do it.
And they are so proud. I mean, it’s only November, but they’re so proud of their handwriting now. And one of the things that happened in mainstream education is this wholesale adoption of what I would just call utilitarianism, where the mindset is, if they’re not going use it, why should we teach it?
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Jeremy Tate:
And so that’s the mindset. It’s very difficult to justify something like Latin or penmanship. But if you actually meet someone who is well-trained in Latin, or somebody who has beautiful penmanship, you start to notice some patterns of, wow, this person seems like a very observant person. This person’s a very attentive person. This is a detail-oriented kind of person. It actually cultivates these disciplines, these virtues, and that’s, I think, really what we need to get back to.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. It’s funny that you bring up Latin. My children have had to start Latin this year, and I got a lot of complaints, but now they’re getting to the point where they like to say things to each other that my husband and I don’t know. So they’ve turned that into a little bit of a secret language between them, which I find very amusing.
But the pride that they have, I will tell you, that’s another thing that I’ve noticed. This is my children’s first year learning Latin, for instance. And they are so proud of themselves because they’ve actually had to catch up to some of the other students who have had it for longer. And they feel very proud that they’ve been able to catch up and keep up, and there are other things that they’re really proud of learning. And I think that they’re actually enjoying school more.
My son got stressed out because he couldn’t find an assignment, and the teacher taught him a prayer while he was freaking out and having anxiety about not being able to find it. She said, “Let’s slow down, and I’m going to teach you a prayer.” And he said it around the house. And so these virtues that they’re teaching them, like the coping mechanism involving prayer to get through a stressful moment, was something I’d obviously never seen happen in public schools.
But I see what you mean about those virtues as teaching them. It goes so far beyond just what they’re learning in the classroom that day. It teaches them to really be good people and good citizens, so it’s been really wonderful.
I want to pivot a little bit though and talk a little bit about your company, CTL, the Classic Learning Test. I am really fascinated about this. Can you tell me, there’s some great information you have on your website, but tell the listeners why was it necessary to start this new company and to start a classic learning test that competes with some of these other college prep tests?
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, love this question so much, obviously love to talk about CLT. People initially assume, man, this is going to be boring. We’re going to talk about standardized testing, who cares. But it’s actually, standardized testing is this incredibly powerful lever that controls really American education. Right? And so I think most teachers I talk to will agree that high-stakes testing, standardized testing, tends to dictate and derive what happens in the classroom. Right?
And so like, for a private secondary school, how do they market themselves? Well, they market themselves based on their PSAT scores, their SAT scores, their AP course offerings, their AP average scores, right? It’s all controlled by the College Board. Right?
Well, what is College Board about? College Board is very, I’d say radically disconnected from the kind of education that gave birth to America, the kind that 100% of America’s founders had. So the idea with CLT is, well, what if there was an alternative to College Board that instead of driving educational curricular focus away from traditions, was actually encouraging fluency with this tradition instead?
And so we rolled out competitive tests to the SAT, to the PSAT, and it’s been really fun because there is a rapidly growing movement, and I think the movement was fragmented for a number of years.
You had classical homeschooling taking off in the Catholic world and in the Protestant world and in non-Christian or religious people, but then you also had the classical charters launching, and then a lot of Catholic schools reembracing their Catholic identity, which includes reembracing the tradition of the church, which is the classical tradition.
And I think really just within the past few years, all of these movements have gotten locked up together. And I think CLT has been a big part of that. Our academic board, we tried to grab people and influencers from all of these various spheres. And so I think CLT is serving as the lowest common denominator where if you’re a classical charter or you’re homeschooling, CLT is maybe one of those things that you have in common.
And it’s a way to actually gauge, well, you care about classical literature, you care about your students reading philosophy, how do they do reading philosophy? And so we’re putting students in front of those kinds of texts rather than often just the meaningless texts the College Board uses or often the very, very biased. I mean College Board, love Bernie or hate Bernie, College Board’s putting Bernie Sanders on the SAT two years ago.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah.
Jeremy Tate:
Why not Frederick Douglass? Why not Ben Franklin instead? So these tests are very, very political.
Julie Gunlock:
Are colleges recognizing this classical learning test in place of these other tests?
Jeremy Tate:
They are, yes. There’s about 200 partner college. Hillsdale, our closest partner right now. A lot of schools though went test-optional during COVID. A lot will stay test-optional, but a lot of top schools, they still do tie test scores, CLT scores, to top scholarships.
And actually CLT, we’re actually very for the test-optional movement. I understand actually that testing can be anxiety provoking —
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Tate:
— for a lot of young people, but there’s also a lot of young people who they’re really excited to show off what they can do, and a test like the CLT is a great way to showcase that.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s amazing. I want to end this on a good note, but I do have one more question, and I don’t know if you’re like me, but goodness, I feel like I have a little bit of CRT fatigue. I’m so tired of talking about that, but it is.
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah.
Julie Gunlock:
Do you feel that way? I feel like I’m so tired of talking about this, but it is important, and it is still in the schools and it’s interesting, Jeremy, I left the public schools, and there is a part of me that just doesn’t want to think about it anymore. Right? I want to take Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Right? I want to make my little house, have my little house. We have movie night and then send them off to school, and they’re in the safe space.
And I don’t want to think about some of the bigger issues because it is upsetting to me what’s going on in the public schools. And it’s upsetting to me that so many children are trapped in those schools. Don’t have a mom that works from home. Their families don’t have the finances to afford two private school tuitions or family to help them.
And so that’s why I am still involved. And I think you are too, I’ve seen you on Twitter. You are always so civilized and polite. I can’t say the same for myself, but you are always so civilized and polite.
But you do talk about these issues. What’s going on in the schools. You do touch on them. And I saw one post that you made about CRT and why it doesn’t fit into a classical structure. And I’d love you to touch on that a little bit. You don’t have to say exactly what you said, but I’m not keeping track, but when I talk to people about my children going to this new classic…
The curriculum that this school actually uses is Memoria Press. And I was so excited because I use Memorial Press for my homeschooled child.
Jeremy Tate:
I love it, yeah.
Julie Gunlock:
And there’s a million. That’s not a plug. Believe me. That is not a plug, but I will plug Memoria. I get nothing to say Memoria Press, but I will literally plug them more. I love it so much. I feel like it’s saved me a little.
Jeremy Tate:
They’re dear friends.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. And they’re wonderful, and they make it very, very easy for new homeschoolers. And then I chose this private school that uses Memoria Press and has a classical approach, and I know that my kids are safe there.
And one of the reasons that CRT can’t possibly be used in that kind of setting. So tell me why. Tell me why this is a way for parents to keep your kids a little, if you choose a school that employs this style of learning, you might keep them a little safe from this stuff.
Jeremy Tate:
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I think the irony with it too, is that a lot of the classical schools that I know really well, they’re actually reading a lot more Black history.
Julie Gunlock:
Sure.
Jeremy Tate:
They’re reading more Frederick Douglass. They’re reading, they’re reading Du Bois and MLK. They’re actually getting a much deeper understanding of America’s story around slavery and race than having a modern ideology being impressed upon them.
And so, I think because the classical school, the focus of the school is, I would say, maybe creating agency for young people, empowering them through the transmission of this beautiful tradition. And with that, I think partly what’s embedded within CRT is a victimhood ideology. And no doubt, you can make a case that America is unfair, that some students are at an advantage and other students are at a disadvantage.
But what I experienced when I was a teacher in inner-city New York is that it was actually the teachers who grew up in inner-city — I was at a school in Brooklyn — who were the ones who didn’t like this victimhood ideology, that it was actually a lot of the very young, very affluent, progressive teachers that were bringing in, that were coming in and letting the students know everything was stacked against them.
And this was a school that was 100% minority students, and I remember one of the teachers in particular, Mr. Wilkerson, would pull some of the young teachers aside and be like, “stop. These students need to understand that they can do anything.”
Julie Gunlock:
Anything.
Jeremy Tate:
“Nothing can stop them. That they’re not fighting a system that’s set against them, that this is, you know.” So yeah, I think it’s having a focus. There is a void that was left when we got rid of all. When we got rid of this idea that we’re transmitting this body of knowledge, the classics, the canon to the next generation. We got rid of that, it left a void. And I think CLT is one of many things that is trying to fill that space.
Julie Gunlock:
Yes, that’s really well said. And I loved what you have. So I’ve heard you talking about classical education is passing on beauty at the transmission of a treasure, I’ve heard you say. I’m not sure I’m saying that absolutely correctly. But the sentiment is there that that’s what I feel like my children are learning. And the virtues of being a good person, I think, are really being taught to my children. And I’m so thrilled.
I like to leave my podcast on a happy note, and I have to tell you, when I was researching and putting together my show script, I always have my questions laid out, and I had put your bio in, and I found and I read your very official-sounding bio, but earlier I had found another bio and I want to read it because it’s so much better. It’s much shorter, but it’s so much better.
And obviously it’s an old bio because it says you’re the father of five children, so you’ve since had a sixth child. So it says, “Jeremy Wayne Tate is the happy father of five children. He’s a former high school educator and current homeschooler and the founder of the Classic Learning Test. His favorite book is Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.” Right? So intellectual, right? “And his favorite movie is Dumb and Dumber.” And that made me howl. I thought that was so funny. I think you are a very, very, very well-rounded person, Jeremy, and I’m so glad you came on today to talk to us about this really important topic.
Jeremy Tate:
Hey, Julie, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for all the great work y’all are doing at Independent Women’s Forum, and happy to chat anytime.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s great. Well, stay in touch, and thanks again for coming on.
Thanks, everyone, for being here for another episode of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. If you enjoyed this episode or like the podcast in general, please leave a rating or review on iTunes. This helps ensure that the podcast reaches as many listeners as possible.
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