Standardized testing might sound like a dry topic to most, but Classic Learning Test (CLT) founder Jeremy Tate joined Drew Mariani to discuss the newest developments that aim to cultivate much more than students' future job skills.

Standardized testing matters because it shapes what students learn. “Teachers inevitably teach towards the test,” he said, and that’s why he helped launch the (CLT) in 2015 as a third option to the SAT and ACT.

Tate argued education shouldn’t be reduced to “what’s useful” for a job. He believes high school learning should recover “cultural transmission … and also moral formation, the cultivation of virtue,” rooted in the Western intellectual tradition.

Drew warned that when schools strip away moral clarity and intellectual richness, kids are the ones who lose. “We need to go back and form the soul … by their grasp of truth and beauty and goodness,” he said, adding, “I don’t know, there’s something profoundly Catholic about that, if you ask me.”

Tate pushed back on critics who call the CLT merely “conservative,” saying it’s rooted in the tradition students inherit. He claimed the CLT is “objectively the most rigorous right now,” and for families wondering about time, he noted the CLT has “always been 120 questions, 120 minutes”— slightly shorter than the new SAT.

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