"and so the diversity ends up lacking"
Mark Bauerlein, Jeremy Tate, and the Classic Learning Test
Thanks for visiting Narrative Nation!
This post is part of a short series on Florida education written in connection with the book I’m developing, “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative. Most of the posts in this column are about the ways the story of the nation is told and revised in places of emotional significance to many Americans.
After taking a long break to finish the teaching semester, this post continues my look at the dismantling of Florida public education under the pretext of restoring some loosely defined and romanticized sense of freedom and greatness to the American public. Previously, I looked at the mission statement Christopher Rufo proposed for New College of Florida after he was appointed chairman of the board by Governor Ron DeSantis. Here, I introduce two more bad actors to the cast: former Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein and co-founder of the “Classic Learning Test” Jeremy Tate.
As the nation witnessed Ron DeSantis’s hostile takeover of the Florida education system in late 2022 and early 2023, an academic named Mark Bauerlein was also receiving a bump in media attention for his notions about education, curriculum, testing, and what kinds of people are important. Bauerlein is a self-described former liberal atheist cum “Western Civilization” advocate, conservative Catholic convert, outspoken so-called patriot, and Trump supporter.
In 2022, Bauerlein milked his claim to fame, the 2008 book The Dumbest Generation (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under Thirty) with an update: The Dumbest Generation Grows Up. The new book was released by Regnery Publishing, described on its website as “the country’s leading publisher of conservative books,” boasting works by a “‘who’s who of conservative thought and action, including Ann Coulter, David Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, Mark Steyn, Mark Levin, Ed Klein, David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham, Donald Trump, and many more.” This part of the story tells itself.
Bauerlein also recently joined the board of visitors at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, an unaccredited entity with only two faculty members and no real campus that nevertheless describes its mission as a “revival and reinvention of the traditional university” and carries the logo, “to think is to be free.” Right-wing commentator Jordan Petersen was recently appointed chancellor.
With these bona fides and associations, in the first few weeks of 2023 Bauerlein joined Christopher Rufo among the group of six New College trustees appointed by DeSantis. From that dias, he continues his attack on contemporary society, including the cancellation of the school’s gender studies program in what he believes is the first such move in the culture wars on education.
Bauerlein’s general lack of faith in the 21st century makes him a perfect fit for DeSantis’s efforts to whitewash the American curriculum. DeSantis is looking to replace College Board materials such as the SAT and the AP tests with alternative assessments and related curriculum with a decidedly old school white European focus. The tentacles of this project reach into numerous aspects of the education system, but here I want to look primarily at something called the Classic Learning Test (CLT), a project founded in 2015 and currently used by more than 300 private, home, and charter schools.
the “Classic Learning Test”
The CLT is among the SAT alternatives the DeSantis administration has been considering. Henry Mack, chancellor of the Florida Department of Education, tweeted in early 2023, “Not only do we need to build anew by returning to the foundations of our democracy, but CLT also offers the opportunity for all our colleges & universities to rightsize their priorities.” He shared another tweet from a member of the CLT board verifying its focus on the “great classical and Christian tradition.”
Such bold claims for how an admissions test taken by high school students could change or “rightsize” the trajectory of a college are in the same vein as Christopher Rufo’s mission statement for New College claiming to produce students who “will move the world” after receiving an education in the “highest good” appropriate to “free society.” According to CLT, the purpose of the test is to “reconnect knowledge and virtue by providing meaningful assessment and connections to seekers of truth, goodness, and beauty.” This truth-goodness-beauty trifecta is claimed by nearly all the new classical education charters siphoning money from neighborhood public schools.
CLT’s co-founder Jeremy Tate, in an irony that should not be ignored, accuses the SAT of being “increasingly ideological” and of having “censored the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and other “thinkers in the history of Western thought.” By contrast, Tate says the CLT provides an escape from what he and people like DeSantis call the “left-wing indoctrination” of mainstream education. In a 2023 interview with Veritas Vox, a “Classical Christian education” podcast, Tate explained his opposition to the College Board in explicitly religious terms: “they've always been on the left, I would say. But they are now aggressively secular . . . undermining the mission of Christian schools.”
I’m not a big fan of the SAT or the College Board’s near-monopoly on testing. But the agenda of people like Tate is to replace those instruments with their own “aggressively” white, Western, and Christian ones. Ron Desantis’s twin strategy in the attack on Florida education involves removing DEI materials and programs from colleges while “mandating courses in Western civilization.” Tate is enthusiastic about some Florida legislation that would connect the CLT to the state’s well-funded Bright Futures college scholarship program.There’s a lot more to be said about the hypocrisy and manipulation of these far right institutions (such as the Hillsdale College mothership) that brag about refusing public funding so they can preserve and flout their lack of diversity, yet openly launch plans to fund their longterm agenda with state and local education money.
the plan to change America
In 2018, five years before these curriculum-controlling maneuvers were so plainly introduced in Florida and other states, Bauerlein interviewed Tate about the test. They spoke on Bauerlein’s Conversations podcast, part of a conservative journal on religion and public life called First Things, where Bauerlein is also an editor. Parts of the more recent statements from DeSantis and Rufo are mirrored in this older conversation.
Their ostensible topic was “the revitalization of standardized testing and American education.” Ironically, their vision of revitalization involves a reversion to a reading list populated by writers—exciting or boring as the case may be—often referred to fairly enough as “dead white guys.”
Tate describes the test as “an alternative to the SAT and ACT that draws from the greatest minds in the history of Western thought.” Bauerlein correctly notes that the tests most commonly in use “will not pick up how much you know about great books” or whether you’ve been reading the classics associated with the Western Civilization curriculum. His examples of needful reading include the Confessions of St Augustine because he feels American students headed for competitive colleges will encounter that text as undergraduates. I have doubts about how frequently Augustine appears in courses for most college majors, but I do see the same text being used as an example of both moral instruction and European heritage in the curriculum for numerous classical charter schools following the Hillsdale College curriculum or something similar. Bauerlein’s tone is haughty, and his demeanor is dismissive, but his words are often far right boilerplate. So he’s perfect for the New College board of trustees.
The more Bauerlein and Tate talk, the more obvious it becomes that they are not only concerned with reading selections to test students’ skills and mental acuity—their readiness for higher education—but also with engineering a test to reward and advance students educated in an older Euro-American tradition. The reading passages on the CLT would supposedly engage “the greatest questions,” but that does not mean they want students to engage with contemporary society. To the contrary, Tate explains that its focus on material from “previous generations” allows the CLT “to avoid some of the hot-button issues today.”
Ignorance of the modern domestic and global causes of social problems is part of the goal, not unlike the manufactured hysteria over critical race theory driven in large part by Rufo. Tate and Bauerlein know that concentrating the curriculum on Western classics could effect a general shift in American attitudes.
Tate: “At the end of the day, testing really, really does drive curriculum.”
Bauerlein: “All those high school classes would change.”
Tate: “All those high school classes would change, exactly. And I would say, more than that, America would change. All of a sudden, we would find ourselves with students that are ethically literate, are informed with the great questions and the great religious traditions that have shaped our nation in the way that they are currently being inoculated from in some ways right now.”
Bauerlein: “Right, right. Well . . . if more students took tests with classic literature, that would be an instant transformation of the curriculum.”
Bauerlein’s interest in how the CLT could shift national priorities is related to another curriculum project he has worked on, the Common Core. He cites a learning standard included in the Common Core, described in the interview with Tate as demonstrating “knowledge of foundational works of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century literature.”
Unpacking the implications of the “foundational works” learning standard, Bauerlein said, “So, we’re not going to read comic books” and “we’re not going to go after 1960.” Comic books and graphic novels have long been used to engage students in the study of culture and history. But genre and style aside, 1960—sixty-five years ago—is when Bauerlein seems to feel comfortable shutting off the typical student’s knowledge.
A 65-year period is not that long, but then again it really can be. Surely Bauerlein knows what tremendous cultural shifts happened in the years between 1860 and 1920, and surely he understands that an educated early 20th-century person would have needed to understand much about the previous half-century.
But Bauerlein does not extend that logic to the present generation. His ideal “revitalized” curriculum assumes that our 21st-century students don’t need to know much about the years between 1960 and 2020. And surely it’s not because he has forgotten what cultural revolutions have directly impacted American society in these decades. A short list of changes it seems he would not like students to read about—based on his comment about not reading past 1960—includes the Civil Rights movement and the forced desegregation of American public schools; countercultural movements such as second wave feminism and the push for LGBTQ+ community rights; the development of affirmative action policies; and the general crisis in authority and media catalyzed by the American War in Vietnam. It’s easy to grasp why some elements of the conservative white male ruling class have been made uncomfortable by these changes in the national conversation. One of Bauerlein’s claims to fame is an unpleasant treatise about young people—in which a curmudgeon bemoans a general lack of interest in the things he cares about—while he is advocating for curricular changes that would, in fact, make young people less able to function in the society we have.
As Bauerlein continues, he rationalizes sacrificing diversity in favor of an America-first curriculum:
You also have to start pinning down, what are the foundational works. . . . I mean, we got that into the [Common Core] standards, but I think a lot of people don’t quite like it, because they don’t want to single out certain works as foundational. They don’t want to go too deeply into the past because if we do that, then the authors get more and more white and male. There are not very many black American writers from the eighteenth century. That’s a historical fact. And so the diversity ends up lacking. But then of course, if we don’t [select foundational works], then we’re graduating students from high school who have a very thin understanding of . . . American literary history.
It’s a smarmy little argument. Bauerlein presents the loss of diversity that results from “pinning down” the canon as a minor, even accidental sacrifice for the greater good of teaching the older parts of American literary history. His phrasing tries to soften the blow: “And so the diversity ends of lacking.” Even while spilling the beans in the comments noted above and more, Bauerlein maintains that the CLT is really about providing a third major testing option. “Who could be against this?” he innocently wonders.
Yet some of his other comments surface a more aggressive, discriminatory agenda: helping colleges secure students with a particularly white, Christian, and European educational background. Jeremy Tate is more direct about employing this test to create a more narrowly-defined college student body: the “CLT can be a pipeline,” he told Bauerlein. “They’re not just tests, they’re also enrollment engines.”
Developing a more rigorous high school curriculum and the attendant testing instruments some colleges might use to identify promising students is a goal many could get behind for various reasons. But these classical education proponents want to accomplish this by advancing a narrative in which only older, traditional voices are worth understanding and in which questions about what kinds of people have been able to produce a large body of long-studied texts are glibly dismissed.
Bauerlein hides behind the childish retort “That’s a historical fact” to excuse the lack of inclusion in his whitened curriculum. Of course it is a “historical fact” (are there really other kinds?) that there were comparatively few Black American writers in the 18th century, and this fact drives the larger conversation we’ve been having for decades now. Decolonizing the curriculum requires purposefully creating space for the texts that exist, for the voices, however few from any given position, that managed to be recorded as witnesses to national and personal history. One feels Bauerlein must be playing dumb or has somehow been dropped on his head. In my book, I look in more detail at some other stuff Bauerlein has said that he must know is garbage.
But maybe it needs to be explained. There are comparatively few 18th-century Black-authored American texts because almost the entirety of the Black American population at that time was enslaved, and the vast majority of the enslaved were denied literacy. Nowhere is it written that a meaningful education should be built on a selection of texts directly proportional to the texts that exist or to historical population numbers, or according to any other disingenuous rationale for ignoring marginalized people. As educators with an ethical responsibility to provide students with the information and tools to improve the future, including for the oppressed among us, we can and should provide a variety of perspectives. But these horsemen of cultural regression are less interested in education than indoctrination—the word is not, as some on the far right would have the public think, limited in its application to new or radical ideas. There is rearguard indoctrination, too.
Though Bauerlein emphasizes learning the American curriculum first and foremost, at the expense of diversity, we should question why college readiness requires such a heavy focus on American literature that it becomes exclusionary. Why is the goal not to globalize American high school students’ education? Why should it be so easy to dismiss what he acknowledges is a lack of diversity in the curriculum that would follow widespread adoption of an instrument like the Classic Learning Test? White nationalism comes to mind.
In 2020, Bauerlein wrote an article for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative organization dedicated to increasing universities’ focus on “traditional principles of justice, ethics, and liberal education” because “[s]tudents know little about the history of their country or the institutions that led to this nation’s prosperity and liberty.” Though his reason for writing was to complain about today’s “woke” faculty and universities, Bauerlein also described the “revisionist histories” (as if all history is not revisionist) of the 1970s with disgust for having the gall to re-examine the “moral meaning” of the nation’s past:
European explorers were not daring adventurers; they were greedy colonizers. Natives were not uncivilized peoples; they were dignified souls with a culture all their own. America was not a “city on a hill,” a beacon of freedom; it was an empire built on racism and conquest.
As it proceeded, their success in establishing a contrary party line on the West and American [sic] was astounding.
Bauerlein would have preferred the academy stick to the old, uncritically imperialist filters when telling the American story—a seemingly progressive narrative in which daring European adventurers brought dignity and culture to uncivilized peoples under the auspices of a brave new state exemplifying the principles of Christianity and freedom. Yet in the current state of education and academia, Bauerlein believes things have only grown worse:
there is a big difference between the revisionists of old and the Wokesters of today. The revisionists studied the history and culture of the West and of America and denounced them. The Woke ones denounce the West and America and do NOT study them.
His arrogant dismissal of progressive culture, here and in some of his other commentaries, assumes that today’s “woke” college faculty and students have no information or exposure to the ideas they have chosen to critique and, in some cases, drop from the common curriculum. Of course every belief system has its bandwagon effect and some shallow adherents, but Bauerlein doesn’t concede that today’s calls for diversity, inclusion, and equity could genuinely result from true critical thinking.
As Bauerlein said in one of the interviews I watched, “racism, sexism, blah blah blah” (an insight which is naturally the title of my book chapter featuring this topic). His generally decrepit mindset is revealed in one recent article by a terrible effort to compare gender studies—an area of academic inquiry he does not believe should ever be a stand-alone program—to what he calls “the tiresome bedlam of free jazz.” It’s tiresome to Bauerlein because it dares to not be “mindful of the set chords.” I guess he likes to have a pretty good idea of what’s coming next and where it came from. But these conversations he has are so often case studies in fallacy—here is an argumentum ad antiquitatem, and I would think someone so obsessed with the “classics” would know that.
So, to find a safer place for academic white supremacy, Bauerlein and company must reach back before the 1960s when all this blah blah blah started to get some traction. Bauerlein’s goal for curriculum and testing is described on his First Things podcast as the “revitalization” of American education. Rufo’s mission for New College is to “revive the great tradition of the classical liberal arts.” Ralston College thinks it will usher in a “revival and reinvention of the traditional university.” Revival and related words are code for a Eurocentric regression to a time when white Christian men ruled the world even more comfortably and ignored the experiences of others with impunity. In other words, this is what it means to MAGA in the education sector.
Far right operative Chris Rufo, Florida governor and culture wars fanatic Ron DeSantis, Hillsdale College president Larry Arne, education whiteners Mark Bauerlein and Jeremy Tate, and MAGA Mike Johnson—they are all on this offensive mission together. In another post, I’ll connect this to my personal experience as a Florida educator trying to resist what’s currently being imposed on public colleges with the passage of SB 266, a bill that overreaches and undermines higher education in all sorts of ways.
These curriculum attacks matter so much more than their immediate impacts on the industry, profession, or pursuit of higher education. While some fascist and nationalist regimes of the twentieth century tended towards expansion and the military overthrow of other nations (e.g., Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy), today’s American white nationalists, including Christian nationalists, are more inclined towards a more isolationist form of fascism. Pulling away from international affairs and organizations like NATO was one of the 2016 Trump campaign’s selling points, relying on the same kind of culture wars rhetoric that stokes anti-immigrant attitudes and violence domestically. Restricting the educational horizons of our students in the ways proposed by the likes of Bauerlein and Tate will cultivate the insular, xenophobic worldview needed to continue electing demagogues and undermining this democracy.
Thanks for your analysis & work! Whew.
Neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence mentions the name of Jesus or Christ. So to say this nation was founded on any Christian principles is simply a fallacy. I hope they include Frederick Douglass' writings in this American Classical Writing review, particularly his three autobiographies.