In Jeremy Tate’s office in Annapolis, Maryland, there’s a plaque bolted to the wall, with words engraved in tarnished brass. It’s the kind you’d find on a historical landmark, only this message is from the future; it reads: In 2040, the CLT surpassed the SAT and ACT as the number one college entrance exam globally.
“Every day we say our job is to come here and to make this become true,” Tate told me of the sign, which he had made two years ago.
On the surface, the Classic Learning Test (CLT) doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. It’s a two-hour test of reading, grammar, and math, taken by high school seniors as an alternative to the SAT or ACT. There are a few important differences though. Unlike the better-known tests, the texts are Western canon, not news article clips or the Common Core. There is no calculator. The reading passages are more than a few hundred words. The test does not get easier every year if students perform poorly.
The point of the CLT is to make college entrance academically rigorous again, so kids rise to the challenge—and so, ultimately, every high school classroom in America starts teaching the classics again. Tate says he’s “in a battle to save Western civilization.” And he’s not afraid of the competition.
