38: Substance Matters

AMDG. While standardized testing often elicits groans from students and anxiety from parents, what if it didn’t have to? Today Jordan and Bonnie visit with Jeremy Tate, President of the Classic Learning Test. He explains how high-stakes tests drive and dictate academic focus in America, how he decided to go up against the behemoth that is the College Board in designing a different kind of college admission test, and how he’s challenged the societal status quo that excludes great thinkers like C.S. Lewis and John Paul the Great from the literature that test takers must examine. The group also discusses the immense time spent in test prep and what messages are sent by the materials studied in that time. Jeremy describes how the goal of classical education isn’t to make people better employees—it's to make them better humans—but how the best humans often end up being the best employees, too. He reminds listeners that tests give a snapshot into key academic areas at a given point in time, but say nothing about the kind of person that a student is. And he distills his goals into a succinct call to action: read good books, read them a lot, and enjoy them. 

 

https://www.cltexam.com/home 

Anchored podcast 

Interview with CLT rep Brittany Higdon on Kolbe blog 

Student Spotlight: Interview with Kolbe Academy Student Meghan Rohatgi 

 

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