In the sprawling landscape of American education, standardized testing has calcified into a bureaucratic exercise devoid of intellectual ambition. Alabama stands poised to distinguish itself with the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, which offers a bold alternative to institutional stagnation.
More than a technocratic assessment, the CLT represents a deliberate reclamation: a principled intervention against the quiet erosion of educational standards and cultural understanding.
The Atlantic recently lamented an epidemic of collegiate illiteracy: students are increasingly incapable of reading a complete book. A Harvard professor confessed to abandoning Nathaniel Hawthorne because students could not locate subjects or verbs within sentences, let alone decipher 19th-century prose.
Imagine the intellectual paralysis this deficiency portends for understanding the Emancipation Proclamation or the nuanced terms of our founding documents.
The College Board, that leviathan of standardized testing, has progressively diluted academic rigor to match our culture’s diminishing attention span. The SAT now offers reading passages shorter than a typical social media post, a capitulation to technological attention decay that would make Alexis de Tocqueville weep French tears.
A University of Cincinnati study documented a 71-point drop in SAT math test rigor between 2008 and 2023 — a statistic that should alarm any defender of serious intellectual standards.
Jeremy Tate, however, founded the CLT in 2015 as a counterweight. His insight was profound: high-stakes testing has become a Procrustean bed, forcing curriculum into narrow, mechanistic frameworks that strip education of its transformative potential.
The CLT offers a radical alternative: examinations that engage students with the past two millennia’s most meaningful intellectual and cultural traditions.
This approach isn’t about simple nostalgia. The CLT represents a structured rebellion against progressive academic orthodoxy, which systematically eliminates moral and ethical considerations from education.
Whereas the College Board has increasingly prioritized ideological conformity — using Bernie Sanders as an essay prompt and treating environmental ideology as axiomatic — the CLT seeks to restore education’s fundamental purpose: developing intellect and character.
The philosophical lineage is distinguished here. As far back as Plato, education was understood as a holistic endeavor to create better human beings, not merely to produce credentialed workers. The American founders understood education as essential to preserving liberty, a vision the CLT seeks to resurrect.
Alabama’s educational landscape is particularly ripe for cultivation. Classical education in charter schools has increased in the last decade, signaling parents’ deep hunger for substantive, virtue-oriented learning (three cheers for Ivy Classical Academy!).
The CLT offers a testing framework that aligns with this vision, challenging students with rich, meaningful content that requires genuine intellectual engagement.
Consider the practical implications. In Florida, all public universities now accept the CLT. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has implemented it across graduation requirements and universal school choice programs. Alabama has an opportunity to lead similarly, liberating its educational institutions from the College Board’s increasingly narrow and politically charged agenda.
All public universities in Alabama should accept the CLT.
The stakes extend beyond test scores. We find ourselves at a critical juncture, choosing between a utilitarian model that reduces learning to a series of standardized metrics and a pedagogy that contemplates intellectual and moral development.
The CLT is not a panacea, of course, but it represents something essential: a principled alternative that could reverse educational declines.
For Alabama, embracing the CLT would be more than an administrative choice. It would be a declaration of faith in education’s highest purpose: cultivating informed, virtuous citizens capable of sustaining our democratic experiment.
Education today feels untethered, adrift in a culture of fleeting conviction and diminishing coherence. The CLT cuts through the noise, a quiet assertion of continuity in an age bent on forgetting. It doesn’t just chart a course; it restores a purpose, grounding learning in something lasting, something resistant to the whims of trend or convenience.
For Alabama, the choice is stark: persist with a system crumbling under its contradictions or step back into the more rigorous and rewarding work that education should remain.
Allen Mendenhall is Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor in the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University and Executive Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819news.com.
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