Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Jeremy Wayne Tate on Reviving Classical Education (Episode 80)
630 Plays1 year ago
Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
“If a text is not offensive to anyone, it probably isn't very important.”
In this conversation, Caleb speaks with Jeremy Wayne Tate, the Co-founder and President of the Classic Learning Test.
The Classic Learning Test is bringing back a focus on educating the whole human person by focusing on the great works and fundamental philosophical questions about how to live.
If you check out the CLT author bank you’ll find several Stoic names – which we at Stoa love to see.
This conversation focuses on the purpose of education, testing, and how to approach the classics today – all with someone who is in the arena shaping how education is done today.
https://twitter.com/JeremyTate41
(03:31) Telos and Tests
(06:06) Why Go Back To The Classics?
(08:17) The SAT
(09:09) Elite Education
(11:05) The Stoics
(12:14) Crucial Questions
(16:46) How to Approach the Great Works
(20:07) C. S. Lewis
***
Subscribe to The Stoa Letter for weekly meditations, actions, and links to the best Stoic resources: www.stoaletter.com/subscribe
Download the Stoa app (it’s a free download): stoameditation.com/pod
If you try the Stoa app and find it useful, but truly cannot afford it, email us and we'll set you up with a free account.
Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
And so I hope that more have those kinds of experiences where you are changed by a deep, immersive experience with a timeless work that has impacted so many people in so many different places for many, many generations.
Introduction to Stoicism with Michael Trombley
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Alternative Testing: Chat with Jeremy Wayne Tate
00:00:37
Speaker
In this conversation, I speak with Jeremy Wayne Tate, the co-founder and president of the Classic Learning Test. The Classic Learning Test is an alternative to the SAT and ACT. It's been in the news lately as it started to be adopted by more and more schools such as the State University System of Florida.
00:01:01
Speaker
The key idea is to bring back a focus on educating the whole human person intellectually, emotionally, and ethically to help them live a happy and fulfilling life and doing that by focusing on the classic texts and fundamental philosophical questions about how to live.
00:01:22
Speaker
If you Google CLT Author Bank, you'll see that students may be tested on familiar names like Epitetus and Seneca, which we, of course, at STO, I love to see. There are a few key topics we touch on in this conversation.
The Influence of Testing on Education
00:01:39
Speaker
How testing shapes the purpose of an organization and reveals what we value as a society. The importance of questioning default assumptions.
00:01:50
Speaker
around education today, how to approach classic works today, even if one doesn't have much of a background in them, perhaps, especially if one doesn't have much of a background in them. We also touch on one of my favorite thinkers, C.S. Lewis, at the end. The conversation is short, snappy, direct, and on a crucial topic with someone who is in the arena changing how education is done today. Enjoy. Thanks so much for joining.
00:02:20
Speaker
Kiel, thanks for having me. I'm excited for our conversation. Let's start with this broad question.
Jeremy Tate's Journey and Philosophical Insights
00:02:25
Speaker
What's your story?
00:02:27
Speaker
What's my story? I grew up in Oregon, Caleb, and my dad was ATF. My dad was at Waco, if you remember that back in the 1990s when David Koresh convinced many people that he was Christ's return, had a big impact on me as a child, thought that I was going to be going into law enforcement for most of my time growing up. But going into my senior year in high school, somebody gave me a copy of Mir Christianity.
00:02:52
Speaker
And I started reading Lewis, Chesterton, I had a conversion to Christianity at that time in my life and really fell in love with books and ideas at the same time. It was my first, I was a public school kid growing up. I had never been exposed to philosophy or kind of the history of ideas. And so graduated from Louisiana state in 2004, graduated from reformed theological seminary in 2010, converted to the Catholic church in 2010 as well. And launched a classic learning test.
00:03:22
Speaker
in 2015, really out of concerns about the influence the College Board has on American education.
History and Impact of the SAT
00:03:31
Speaker
So how do exams shape the telos of an organization?
00:03:35
Speaker
Best question ever, Caleb, love it. Yeah, I mean, let's just take just the College Board, for instance. Okay, so the College Board has been around since 1900. They're a very old organization. In 1926, they formulated the SAT, which really until the end of World War Two was pretty obscure, not that many people knew of it. But after World War Two, and the GI Bill, suddenly you have more people wanting to go to college than basically seats available.
00:04:00
Speaker
And so you have this sorting that's required. Who are the top applicants? Who are the brightest minds? And so the SAT becomes very important that 10 years after that, the ACT is going to launch as a competitor, but it really launches out of a disagreement with the SAT. So the SAT was a cognitive aptitude test from its origins, right? Essentially, they took the
00:04:22
Speaker
same concept that was used in World War I in the Army Alpha Test. You think about high-stakes testing. In World War I, they were administering multiple choice tests simply to get an idea for who had the highest cognitive ability. If that was you, congrats, you're going to sit back in intelligence. If that is not you, you're going to go to the front lines. Talk about high-stakes testing. They used that same concept to introduce the SAT in 1926. But if you just imagine Caleb as a hypothetical,
00:04:52
Speaker
Let's just say that the SAT from its beginning was a test that mainly was evaluating a student's, let's say, knowledge of the Constitution. Or maybe let's just say it's mainly testing their knowledge of the Old Testament of the Bible, right?
00:05:06
Speaker
That would completely change the academic interest in the Constitution or the academic interest in the Old Testament and the Bible. It would shape profoundly what schools are actually doing. And so my realization in 2015 was that the SAT and the ACT, they're actually driving curriculum at the secondary level. And that's where I found them so problematic.
00:05:30
Speaker
Yeah, right. I suppose there's always a concern that teachers are teaching to the test. And if that's true, well, why not just make the test as good as it can possibly be? Yeah, exactly. Well said. I think it's one of the few concepts that almost every teacher agrees on. And I'm not even saying it's a good thing, Caleb. I think for better or worse, the tests do end up driving the curriculum. And look, if teachers know, all right, on the most important tests,
00:05:52
Speaker
It's likely my students are going to encounter Dante or Shakespeare or John Locke, some of these luminaries, then they're going to be far more inclined to get their students ready by immersing them in those kinds of texts as well. Yeah. So what's the motivation then for going back to the classics?
The Benefits of Classical Education
00:06:12
Speaker
Of course, we're always happy with that. It's a stoicism podcast, so always happy we go back to classics, but always got to ask that root question.
00:06:19
Speaker
Love it. I'm coming into this recording. I was talking to my CFO and Sorin Schwab, our marketing lead and sales lead. We had this weird practice at CLT. No matter how busy things are getting, we spend the first 30 minutes of the day on Monday.
00:06:36
Speaker
reading out loud together as a company. For so many people, their favorite was Marcus Realis' Meditations. We did that. We'd read a handful every day. We'd unpack them. We'd think about them together as a company. It's very much a part of the culture that we have here at CLT. What you got back to at the very beginning here in terms of thinking about the telos, the goal, what is the purpose? Education is something that collectively in the United States,
00:07:01
Speaker
We spend well over a billion dollars on per year, massive amounts of funding. And when you ask most people, well, what's the purpose of all? I would actually, Caleb, as a teacher, not because I was testing them, I didn't know I was becoming very disenchanted with the public school project. And I would ask students my last couple of years in the classroom, why are we here? What's the point? I don't think that they knew that I was trying to figure it out myself.
00:07:24
Speaker
And they would, they would just say to get a better job. And they would kind of say it like, we know this already to get a better job. That's why we're here.
00:07:32
Speaker
And I would then write up on the chalkboard, the object of education is to learn to love what is beautiful, which is taking the gist of what Plato, I think, his thoughts on education. And they were baffled. They never heard or seen anything like this, this concept of shaping the affections, of disciplining the soul, considering the good life, what we're here for, where human happiness is to be found.
00:07:55
Speaker
So it was really about the goal more than even the source material, more than wanting to champion the Western intellectual tradition or the canon. Going back to the purpose being the cultivation of virtue, the formation of the whole human person, rather than this very soulless like credentialing and
00:08:17
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I suppose at its best, SAT would be purely testing for some cognitive aptitudes, some mathematical abilities, some verbal abilities or something of this sort. And that very edge of the SAT is interesting. They become somewhat more controversial with people dropping it, thinking that perhaps it doesn't do those things, right? It's a discriminatory in some way. Yeah.
00:08:42
Speaker
I think that's what a lot of folks don't know is that it's a completely different test than the one. You look pretty young, Caleb. I took the SAT in 1999, 2000. I graduated from high school in 2000. Back then, there were analogies, there were logic questions. It's a totally different test now than it was back then. None of that is there. All of that's gone. It's now a Common Core-aligned public school achievement test. There's definitely, we feel like a need for another option.
00:09:09
Speaker
Well, how do you respond to the typical concern that some people have that classics is elitist, it's exclusionary, you know, it's not the sort of thing that's available to all these great works.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting, but I think they're still kind of out there. This conception of classical ed is referring to what they're doing at the boarding schools in New England. There's this elitist, snobby, high society aspect to it. It's a weird objection. In fact, it's a weird objection to anything. I think you could object to something like a BMW or a high level Tesla for the same reason of their elitist.
00:09:47
Speaker
Classical education is elite. It's not elitist, but it is elite. It is the best kind of education. And it's precisely the kind of education the generation after generation of enslaved Americans were fighting to have access to. That was really all there was, was classical education. And so the way I typically respond is that I think if you put any parent in front of both.
00:10:11
Speaker
in front of a fair picture for what is classical education and what is kind of mainstream modern progressive education, I think every parent is going to want their kid to receive a classical education. Every parent wants their kid to go to school and come back more honest. They want them to come back with a deeper sense of curiosity and wonder about the world. I think they want their moral imagination to be stirred and formed.
00:10:36
Speaker
These are universal human longings. I think that classical education can reintroduce people to, but I do see it as a concern, but not one that insurmountable.
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, it seems it's always I think an odd objection to put forward if like the thought is it's so elite, it can't be attained by the typical person. But of course, that's not true by any means. Yeah, yeah. Well, turning to some of these ancient works then, what have you learned from the Stoics? How's that approach or influence your approach either to life or this project of yours?
Stoicism's Impact on Education Approach
00:11:18
Speaker
Yeah. You know, again, Marcus Aurelius reading, uh, meditation, you know, as a company out loud together, you know, thinking through it, there's thinking through the role that, that philosophy had in some of the great leaders of the past. I think he's been, been very influential on CLT. And I think what we're saying, and you see this, I believe by the broad appeal of someone like Jordan Peterson, even the appeal of someone like Spencer Clavin is young people right now, especially coming out of the public school system. Um, they're bored out of their minds.
00:11:47
Speaker
That's actually the number one problem that gets ignored, right? They are so bored. If you take all the transcendental ideas out of education, if you take out everything that's just so controversial that we need to avoid it, you end up with a very boring curriculum and a very boring school day. And you end up with students that just look like us. And, and so I think we want to be reenchanting by introducing them to these kinds of conversations that have been happening for, for countless generations.
00:12:15
Speaker
Yeah, I saw a question for one of your optional and scored essay sections was, the Stoic philosophers were deeply concerned by emotion and its tendency to overwhelm. Can emotion be a good thing? I mean, that's just a question that's going to kick off great discussion, great reflections. And it's the sort of thing where, you know, going back to some of the talks earlier, it's a high stakes question, this issue of emotions, how to use emotions.
00:12:39
Speaker
And thinking about that with people like the Stoics, people from other traditions who have wrestled with these sort of questions can only be a good thing.
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, couldn't, couldn't agree more. And we're at a moment right now with really tense, you know, partisan divisions in the country right now. We're with a lot of ideology that had a big impact on thinking in a lot of our schools. And for students to be able to step back and to have any kind of perspective on their own moment requires that kind of level of detachment.
00:13:12
Speaker
from what they're feeling. And in some ways, that is the first step to being a seriously educated person. One of the things that we're trying to do in CLT, and this is very different than the SAT and ACT, they have what are called sensitivity committees for both the SAT and the ACT.
00:13:27
Speaker
And the idea of a sensitivity committee is that a text could be triggering for a student or it could be rattling. Now, I don't think all of this is so silly, actually, Caleb. I think some of the origins of this idea are pretty good, right? So when the sensitivities kicked off 25 years ago, part of the idea was, well, if a student had an uncle commit suicide or something, we wouldn't want to put them in front of a passage that references suicide during the test because then they're not even going to be able to get an accurate score and they're going to be rattled. I totally get that.
00:13:56
Speaker
But they've gone full fanatical with the sensitivity committees. Now, I've met with people from the College Board Sensitivity Committee and anything, anything now is deemed to be triggering or offensive or upsetting. At CLTE, we're trying to use prudence, but to really take almost the exact opposite approach.
00:14:14
Speaker
is that you know what, if a text is not offensive to anyone, it probably isn't very important either. And so we intentionally look at passages that were deeply troubling, divisive in their own time period and putting students in front of those. And I believe it is a mark at least, it's one mark of a truly educated person that they can read something that's offensive that they don't agree with and can still understand what the author is saying. They can still understand it.
00:14:43
Speaker
And I think that is that's what is so missing about it. And we've got a whole generation of even college students that don't want to be exposed to certain ideas because they're so upsetting to them. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So how do you think about that question when it comes to selecting works from your own reading list? Like are there particular works that you wouldn't choose for that very reason or
00:15:08
Speaker
And my own reading list in terms of like Jeremy Tate personal reading or are you talking? Let's do personal personal seems interesting. You know, is there something that you wouldn't maybe touch or at least, you know, there's so many things to read. Maybe it's not a factor that you wouldn't touch it. You just wouldn't prioritize reading that. I try to be really disciplined with, with being willing to read anything anybody sends me, especially if it's something I don't, you know, already agree with. I want to be extra intentional there to read it.
00:15:33
Speaker
But I kind of organize my own reading around kind of modern kind of business books. I mean, CLT is an entity, and so I want to make sure that we are operating well as kind of a well. So I've been very immersed in a book called Traction right now, Geno Whitman book, and toggling those with a classic, you know, or some kind of an ancient text.
00:15:53
Speaker
As well, I've been very into recently actually kind of the dystopian novels. I haven't read many of them. I read the Hunger Games years ago. If you can now include that, maybe we could debate that in the mix, but just thread Fahrenheit and then doing 1984 right now. So yeah, trying to, I didn't, I didn't receive a classical education growing up.
00:16:10
Speaker
I was really exposed in seminary and it wasn't even the point of seminary. It was just kind of, as I was in seminary and thinking back about my time in the classroom, I kind of, I remember thinking this, wow, like, wow, almost every generation, they were trying to do something entirely different in the goal of education than what we're trying to do now.
00:16:34
Speaker
You know, this is a complete 180 that we've done in terms of the basic goal of education. So yeah, I'm still kind of new. I've only been really immersed in discovering this tradition for about 10 years.
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I suppose you have a message for people who think, you know, classical education is great, but myself, I'm not that deeply steeped in the classics. Or if I look at, you know, the CLT Arthur bank, there are so many names I haven't poked into yet, even though I feel I should. And what's, what's your thoughts there? Yeah, in my experience, and Kayla, maybe you've seen this as well, but it seems like most people are very new. The majority of people have kind of recently discovered this, you know, when I was going into my junior year in college.
00:17:15
Speaker
My wife now, a girlfriend at the time, broke up with me. I ended up spending the summer in Alaska totally removed from technology. I think I'd have a move to try to impress her because she became very into Russian literature. I got a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I just heard about it, but I had zero distraction that actually in Alaska where it never gets dark, I could read by sunlight until past midnight.
00:17:41
Speaker
And I've never been so immersed in reading before, partly because there was nothing else to do. There was no notifications on a smartphone or anything like that. But what it did is it changed my views on profound things through literature. My views on what sin is, on what grace is, on what real forgiveness looks like, on what real salvation looks like. And so I hope that more, and I think it's harder now than ever,
00:18:10
Speaker
to have those kinds of experiences where you are changed by a deep, immersive experience with a timeless work that has impacted so many people in so many different places for many, many generations.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think so with all these distractions, of course. I think also a lot of people might feel some amount of hesitation jumping into some of these great works or feeling like you need to commit to a single one, but there are so many popularizes as well. You mentioned Spencer Clayvan, who does, I think, great work.
00:18:40
Speaker
promoting some of these are explaining say say some of Plato's dialogues or more recent works in the canon that if people you know pick up a handful uh see what they're able to uh they're motivated to finish and i think have the confidence to do it
00:18:59
Speaker
I'd recommend as a best practice, you know, I started doing this and it really allowed me to get immersed is take something like Plato's Apollo, right? This is like an hour-long read. It's very quick. We're talking about the trial of Socrates, essentially. But if you combine actually reading the book with Audible at the same time, it can actually, in my experience, give you a more immersive experience of the text, know where the inflections are and that sort of thing.
00:19:28
Speaker
I'll give you a little bit of a head start in getting a sense of the tradition, but I find that the more you read also, the easier it becomes. You know, once you read a little bit of, let's say Dante and Shakespeare, it becomes a bit more natural to pick up Boethius or something like that than it would be otherwise.
00:19:47
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Yeah. The point about listening is great as well. I think especially with people like Shakespeare, for whatever reason, I think he's a lot more easy to listen to right then for many to read, given that you have the cadence, at least if the performance is any good, you have a useful cadence, inflection of the voice. And that's very helpful, I think. Yeah.
00:20:07
Speaker
Excellent. Well, one thinker you've mentioned quite a lot who's been very influential is C.S. Lewis. So I'm curious, you know, how has the abolition of man specifically influenced your work?
C.S. Lewis and Universal Truths in Education
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah, I love, love, love to talk about the abolition of man. And I heard it referenced for a long time before I actually read it. And the first thing I did when I finished reading the abolition of man for the first time is I started over and I read the whole thing.
00:20:32
Speaker
typically I'll revisit a book a few years apart. The abolition of man, I just read it and I read it again. And one of the things that really sticks out to me about the abolition of man is Lewis's foresight, and not grounding his argument in the language of the West. But even in a more universal language, he uses the language of the doubt, essentially he means natural, we call natural law.
00:20:54
Speaker
And what he does is he really puts his finger on the departure that we've made in mainstream education. And he does this in a very universal way. And so one of the criticisms I hear a lot about classical education is that Eurocentric and it's pushing dead white men from Europe and all of this. Well, I think Lewis anticipates that argument in some ways, and he makes the case that
00:21:18
Speaker
the teacher, the good teacher for all of human history, east, west, wherever it may be, their goal was to help the student to understand reality, the Tao, natural law, right? Reality itself and to conform around it and to learn to be happy in doing so, right? I think of the Tao or natural law where reality is somewhat like the grain of the universe, you know?
00:21:47
Speaker
And if you've cut wood much, anybody knows that when you cut with the grain, it's a lot easier than cutting against the grain, right? This is why you can split a big fat piece of wood right down the middle if it's standing up, you know, you can you can cut with with the grain, whether you're going to chop for a long time going against the grain.
00:22:06
Speaker
And Lewis makes the argument that we went outside the Dow. He says that he questions if anything has been good, departing from traditional morality, right? Much of what he rides in the abolition of man, I actually saw reflected in the first chapter or two in mere Christianity. So the first chapter of mere Christianity, he's not even getting into Christianity or any claims that Jesus makes or anything like that.
00:22:34
Speaker
What he's doing is he's taking this very common universal everyday experience of just arguing and that what's happening when people are arguing is they're appealing to an unseen metaphysical reality. That everybody has a general sense that they ought to be kind instead of cruel. They ought to be giving. They ought not to steal. They ought to be honest. And that we all know that this law exists, right? And that essentially is what is at the heart and the soul of Lewis's abolition ban.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think you have, he foresaw this kind of relativism in education, this idea that we don't promote ideas of what it is to live the good life anymore in education and some of the impacts of that. You have the loss of these ideas of initiation. I think it's also something that really stuck out to me the first time I read that work. So I highly recommend it.
00:23:34
Speaker
If you haven't read C.S. Lewis, this is work. And it's also another one that I think is relatively, relatively short. Right? It's not a, not a huge tone. Yeah. Oh yeah. And that abolition man is probably, it's very short, maybe 90 pages or so. I'm actually reading a book. I'm curious Caleb, if you've heard of this right now, Peter Krief, it's I surf, therefore I am. Oh, that's really interesting. I haven't, I've heard of Krief, but I have not gone through I surf, therefore I am.
00:23:59
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. So when I was in a reform theological seminary, I took just an elective on CS Lewis and the professor Knox Chamberlain, the first class, cause this is a very, very reformed seminary. He, he gives a 20 minute defense of his reliance on Peter Creve, who's a Roman Catholic as kind of the top, top of Lewis, you know, scholar to kind of unpack Lewis. But.
00:24:22
Speaker
In that class, we really immersed ourselves in the world that Lewis was experiencing. I think because he was in the context that he was in, when the atheist mindset was very much dominant in the early 20th century, that he really thought through first principles in such a profound way.
00:24:45
Speaker
And I think that still speaks to people today. And, look, I don't want to mince words. I mean, I think there's an absolute tragedy that's going on in mainstream education right now. And, you know, the reason I bring up Peter Creath and I serve, therefore I am, is he goes back to this basic philosophical idea that happiness is the one thing that everybody
00:25:06
Speaker
all over the globe is wanting to go for it, right? Everything that we do in some ways ties back to this goal of happiness. And Lewis makes the case in abolition, a man that in virtue is happiness, right? That in doing the right thing is the way our
00:25:23
Speaker
our souls are designed to live. There's this famous quote from the abolition of man. You know, we make men without chests and expect from them enterprise and all of this, right? And are surprised to find traders that are a mess that we have abandoned this traditional aim of education of cultivating virtue. And then we wonder why we are in, we're living through an absolute moral crisis. It all comes back to education.
00:25:50
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this has been excellent. Do you have anything else you want to add?
Podcast Conclusion and Call to Action
00:25:55
Speaker
Okay. I'm grateful for the work you're doing. Always, always happy to chat. So thanks for having me on as a guest. All right. Perfect. Thanks for joining. Thanks Caleb. Thanks for having me.
00:26:05
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletcher.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:26:35
Speaker
If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the App Store or Play Store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyre.com.
00:26:58
Speaker
And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.