CV NEWS FEED // In his upcoming book, Jeremy Wayne Tate, a Catholic and the founder of the Classic Learning Test, argues that Catholics can save American education.
On April 22, Real Clear Education published an excerpt from Tate’s book For God, Country, & Sanity: How Catholics Can Save America, which is set to come out in May.
In the excerpt, Tate shares his experience as a teacher before founding the Classic Learning Test, as an alternative to the SAT and ACT, and how that shaped his opinion about what the goal of education should be.
“When people argue over the point of including classes like ‘An Overview of Medieval Mysticism’ in a high school curriculum, it’s never long before someone says something like, ‘Oh, come on! When are they going to use that in real life?’” Tate wrote.
Possibly the worst aspect of this perspective, Tate continued, is “the idea that the workplace is real life… What they mean is that you probably aren’t going to use that knowledge in the office. Put more crudely, they mean you aren’t going to be able to make money from knowing it. That’s a really sad idea of what education is.”
“The reason I started the CLT in the first place was because, as a parent and a Catholic, I want more for my kids than that,” Tate wrote, highlighting that education should cultivate human beings’ creativity, as well as their understanding of the meaning of life, morality, and truth. Cultivation of these things should be rooted in the truth that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, he added.
Another aspect of education that needs to be prioritized, Tate argued, is more external than internal: school choice.
“If parents are the primary educators of their children, they need to have the right to choose how to educate their children,” Tate wrote:
If they choose to send their kids to public school, they have a right to know what’s being taught at the school, to give teachers and administrators feedback about it, and to be heard; if they want to send their kids to Catholic school, it should be affordable; and if they decide to homeschool their kids, their legal right to do that should be recognized and protected by the state.
“I see a lot of this, often coupled with criticisms of religious education,” Tate wrote. One concern raised by opponents of homeschooling is domestic abuse, Tate noted, writing that “to be fair, some of them are probably sincere. Domestic abuse does happen, and it’s a danger we absolutely need to be vigilant about.”
However, this does not warrant ending all practices of homeschooling, he argued.
“Some opponents of homeschooling are probably also moved by prejudice or have an agenda they want to use education to impose,” Tate continued, decrying the classic books that have recently been banned or removed from many schools’ shelves, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“It’s also not uncommon for them to scaremonger about such-and-such an ideology being taught in classrooms, even though, if you look into it, it isn’t being taught in classrooms at all,” he wrote.
Concluding the excerpt, Tate wrote that the summarized takeaway of the section on school choice is: “if a politician or a proposal is against school choice, that probably means in practice that they’re going to endorse interference with parents’ rights to educate their children – rights the Church teaches the state should be safeguarding, not dismantling.”
