Like the American two-party political system, American education today has two educational models. On one side is the Progressive style of education rooted in the ideas of John Dewey and his disciples, who asserted that education should churn out white-collar workers with leftist sensibilities and dispense with traditional academic disciplines and fields of study.
On the other hand is a growing network of schools that have developed a classical pedagogy devoted to conserving what is best of the Western tradition. Now, with the introduction of Classical Baccalaureate courses, parents pursuing the latter educational model don’t have to sacrifice their children’s opportunity to get dual credit for classes in high school.
While the Progressive model has some use for accommodating diverse student bodies and pushing millions of young people through the educational assembly line, in practice, this has meant ditching the literary canon, embracing educational gimmicks that seem more “modern,” and stripping all curriculum of any moral content. In doing so the model has produced a critical mass of incompetent adults who lack the knowledge and skills to be independent.
Sure, resourceful students with inborn grit and intelligence can make it through this system relatively unscathed, but the vast majority of graduates are frittering away their formative years in pointless classes and come out of it largely ignorant of the world yet thoroughly indoctrinated with leftist ideology, which in turn leaves them devoid of energy and conviction.
In response to this obvious problem, parents and schools across the country are seeking to revive traditional American education, restoring the literary canon and the liberal arts. More important, this revival aims to place education back within the framework of personal excellence and Christian virtue.
Fortunately, the Classic Learning Test company is meeting the needs of this movement in two key ways. First, it has created standardized assessments that reflect the learning objectives of classical schooling. Rather than take the SAT or ACT, both tests which have undergone innumerable changes to match shifting leftist priorities and help cover up for the alarming decline in intellectual aptitude among American students, high school juniors and seniors can now take the more rigorous and accurate CLT. Already, more than 300 colleges and universities now accept it.
The CLT also has standardized tests for grades 3 through 12. Although these tests might not replace state standardized tests anytime soon, they are a helpful tool to gauge the progress of students by a different, distinctly classical metric.
Second, Classic Learning Test has just announced the creation of the Classical Baccalaureate (CB), which their newsletter describes as “a comprehensive alternative to the International Baccalaureate that restores rigor, coherence, and formation to secondary education.” Presumably, this means that high-achieving high schoolers will no longer be forced to take Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses and exams to earn college credit and receive an advanced-level education. They can continue learning under the classical education model and be assessed accordingly.
For anyone involved in educational reform, this is a major development. The AP and IB programs have held a monopoly over the country’s elite students for decades, allowing their curriculum writers to have enormous influence not only on what the nation’s best and brightest would learn, but how they would learn. These organizations create and score exams that award students who can best recreate leftist viewpoints, produce and disseminate leftist instructional materials, and plan and write curricula that adhere to a strictly leftist intellectual framework.
As a longtime AP English Language and Composition teacher, I can personally attest to the pedagogical deficiencies of the College Board’s most popular product. True to the Progressive model of education, it divorces skills from content, introduces superficial leftist-tinged thinking on important issues, and encourages bad habits in logical reasoning. On countless occasions, I have had to develop my own materials to properly teach my students and prepare them for both the AP exam and college-level work. If I used what the College Board gave me, my students would be wasting time reading essays by dimwits like Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing shallow propaganda tracts on climate change, and having roundtable discussions on how law enforcement is inherently racist.
I can only imagine how difficult it must be for a teacher at a classical school to have his students shift gears during testing season from evaluating the arguments in the Federalist Papers and exploring the themes in the Iliad to speed-reading passages from the 1619 Project and analyzing vapid speeches by Michelle Obama. Even if his students are likely to do fine on this — especially after the AP exam has been recently “revised” to become much easier to pass — it still represents a needless deviation from classical coursework. Rather, he and his advanced students should have their own assessment and materials that match what they are learning.
Now it seems like they will finally have it with the new CB. And, if the program lives up to its promises and proves to be popular, it will finally reach its potential as a viable alternative to AP and IB. It could even become an option for students at public schools if enough parents request it — for my part, I would be more than happy to teach it. Although this mass acceptance of classical education may still be a long way off, it is at least a possibility now, and those of us calling for educational reform should take heart in this.
