May 21, 2021
As part of a recent legal settlement, the University of California system will no longer consider SAT or ACT scores for admission. According to student groups that filed the lawsuit, the tests were racist. Their logic has now become familiar: those who do well on these tests are mostly Asian and white, while those who do poorly are black and Hispanic; therefore, the tests are racist.
There are two fundamental flaws with this logic. First, it frames the issue in terms of race. It asserts that a collective trait, one’s race, is what determines a person’s success rather than one’s individual traits, like a person’s ability to read critically or solve complex problems. This assumes someone’s skin color plays a larger role in his performance on an aptitude test than how often he reads or practices math.
Jeremy Tate
Jeremy Tate is CEO of Classic Learning Test, which is an alternative college entrance exam that exposes young people to some of the most important texts from literature, philosophy, and history.
At the foundation of Americaâs democratic-republican form of government rests the influence of the classics. The Founding Fathers were men who varied in backgrounds, temperament and political beliefs, but shared an abiding appreciation for classical education.
The democratic institutions of Greece and Rome heavily influenced the founders of American democracy, and many regard French and English philosophers Montesquieu and John Locke as providing the intellectual and moral heft for Americaâs democratic-republic.
Howard University, one of the nationâs highly esteemed historically Black institutions of higher learning, recently announced plans to dissolve the classics department. University officials did state that a handful of classes taught within the division would be absorbed into other liberal arts departments. This latter qualifier still sends a message of devaluation for classical education on the Howard campus.
When Cheap, Angry Trends Have Died Out, The Classics Will Remain
April 30, 2021
We were excited to see the sign at the Lansing Mall: Barnes and Noble Booksellers. My roommate and I, on our spring break excursions, were shopping in another city when we spotted the national bookselling chain. We envisioned a long hour of perusing the great books from Cicero to Tolstoy, Shakespeare to Dickens, Plato to Faulkner. My roommate joked she never made it out of a bookstore without purchasing at least one volume.
After walking through a maze of board games, Harry Potter paraphernalia, and $10 romance novels, we found the classics “section” a barely 10-foot-wide corner where “Hamlet” was shoved up beside “The Catcher in the Rye” in an uneven pile. For all that the store owners and its patrons cared, the sign at the top could have read: “Old Stuff.”