A part of my mission at After the Future has been to save the Western Canon from being captured by conservative ideologues. That is a heavy lift these days, and it shouldn't be. There's a reason why people like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt--and really anybody who is truly culturally literate--have spent so much time with Plato and St. Augustine. The former recognize how the latter wrote the cultural software that runs Western Civilization. If you don't understand how Plato and Augustine did that, then you don't understand what or why you think what you think and believe what you believe. For one of the best explanations for why the Western Canon is important from a Progressive perspective, read director of Columbia University's core curriculum Roosevelt Montas's Rescuing Socrates or this piece in Jacobin by Liza Featherstone entitled "The Left Should Defend Classical Education".
So I get a little frustrated when the more public-facing defenses of classical education are showcased in the MSM as part of the conservative social agenda. The results are predictable when a conservative businessman like Jeremey Wayne Tate, the founder of the Classical Learning Test (CLT), gets interviewed by a conventional progressive like the NY Times Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Why is Tate worthy of the attention of the NY Times? Because Ron DeSantis is pushing to replace the SAT with his CLT in the Florida State education system.
I am no defender of SAT or of the whole standardized testing regime in general, including Tate's CLT. But I get pretty frustrated when guys like Tate become the frontmen for defending the Western canon. He doesn't have a prayer against Garcia-Navarro. He's at best a well-intentioned businessman who says, rightly, that a classical education should not be either conservative or liberal--but human. But he's a conservative guy trying to run a company. He'is worried about making payroll, and if the conservatives want to be his customers, then hoo-rah for conservatives.
He gives a ridiculously naive explanation for why public schools are failing and for why even Catholic schools like the one his daughter attends shape their curricula to the test. If the school is daughter attends was serious about their values, they would determine the curricula by their own pedagogical standards, not by what the SAT requires. (See Note 1) And so with such defenders of a classical education as Tate and DeSantis, it is easily condemned as guilty by association by the liberal consumers of the NY Times. Liberals used to know better, but don't now precisely because of the consumerist design and career-training ethos that has become the default in university curricula in the last several decades. Why would anybody in their right minds waste their tuition money on a philosophy or literature course?
I was going to do a more detailed analysis of how the presuppositions of both Garcia-Navarro and Tate gurantee that they will talk past one another, but who really cares? It's the same old, same old. Garcia-Navarro is smart and she asks fair questions, but it's clear that she's in the why-should-we-care-about-what-dead-white-men-think camp. Her audience would be better served if she interviewed Roosevelt Montas or Cornell West (who has a seat on the CLT board), both of whom would be far more capable of defending the importance of the Western canon from a non-conservative perspective than Tate is. She might learn something if she were to do so.
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Note 1: One of the more significant absurdities in Tate's justification for the CLT is the story he relates about how his daughter's Catholic School offers an elective philosophy course that no students sign up for. Why? Because, according to Tate, it doesn't give them AP credits or isn't covered in the SAT. Waste of time. So, in Tate's mind, if curriucla are determined by the standardized test, then you must change the standardized test. It never seems to occur to Tate that if this Catholic School were truly effective in shaping the souls of its students, they should all be chomping at the bit to take this philosophy course for intrinsic motivations. But clearly this school is just turning out kids like every other elite high school, i.e., kids who don't care about learning but about getting ahead. They make choices not according to criteria that Socrates or Aristotle might approve but by what a Neoliberal careerist agenda approves. They are so many young Hippocrates-es looking for a life that Protagoras would train them for. Neither Tate nor Garcia-Navarro get the irony because neither clearly has any idea about what Plato was about.