Photo: Spokes America Homeschool Network outside of St. Louis, MO; author: Nathan Kit Kennedy; CC0 1.0 DEED CC0 1.0 Universal
Many of us know a friend or relative who graduated high school and went to college in the last few years. A big part of that process is selecting which standardized test one must take to submit a college application. Traditionally, the SAT and ACT were the two options a student faces when making this decision. Some students take both. But what if there was a third option for students that could better reflect whether a he or she is truly educated?
This is the question Jeremy Wayne Tate sought to answer in 2016 when he founded the Classical Learning Test (CLT). Tate started his teaching career in public inner-city schools in New York City. The school was fraught with chaos, and he made an interesting observation. Even though they were teaching the students math, American history, and all the basic subjects, they were not teaching them morals and how to live well.
He recognized in Seminary that in all other generations, the purpose of education was the formation of the individual’s moral character. This is the purpose of education in the Western tradition, which is why so many classical schools have cropped up around the country. Tate recognized, though, that there was no way to test for this classical education. This is why he started the CLT – to test not on the woke subjects the ACT focuses on, but instead on the titans of Western tradition: Aristotle, Aquinas, Edmund Burke, etc.
“People laughed when we said we were going to take on the SAT and ACT,” Tate said on X. The first CLT exam only had 46 students take it nationwide. As of 2024, though, the CLT set a new testing record, with over 20 thousand students taking the exam in a single day.
Could a young person that you know benefit from studying for and taking the Classical Learning Test?
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/family/have-you-heard-about-a-superb-alternative-standardized-test/
