Jennifer Berkshire is a journalist, podcaster, and educator. She writes here about a recent appearance on a conservative influencer’s podcast.
Jeremy Wayne Tate, as you are perhaps aware, created something called the Classical Learning Test, an alternative to the ACT and the SAT which Tate and his ilk view as corporatized, politicize pablum. An empassioned booster of the conservative cause du jour, classical education, Tate also hosts the Anchored podcast, the episodes of which typically contain the word ‘classical.’
Now, Tate and I do not have much in common. He’s prone to bold declarations like “I think CS Lewis and GK Chesterton were right about everything,” “I think Western civilization is awesome,” and “I don’t think men can have babies.”
My previous appearance on his pod to discuss A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the book I wrote with education historian Jack Schneider, was mostly a sparring match. This time was different, because we were discussing a topic we’re both passionate about: the liberal arts, specifically the liberal arts in prison education. As you can hear for yourself, there is a remarkable absence of enmity in our conversation. Tate was eager to know about what it’s like to teach in a prison, I was eager to share the stories of my incarcerated students whose lives have been transformed, even saved by what Tate et al would refer to as the ‘great books.’
At one point during our discussion, Tate made a reference to what’s gone wrong with public education in this country. If you’re guessing that he called out teachers unions, or ‘wokeness,’ or too little school choice you’d be incorrect. Tate argues that the purpose of education has been reduced to workforce preparation and little else—a view I happen to share.
I spent several weeks this summer at work on an essay for the Baffler, elaborating on a development on the right that has gone relatively unnoticed. While public school defenders have been focused on school vouchers and book bans, a growing, and influential chorus of conservatives has been making the case against what we might call ‘education by corporation’—the whole idea that the main purpose of education is to prepare kids for jobs. They’ve soured on STEM and think standardized tests measure the wrong thing. “What if you are creating workers who don’t love their country for a future economy that doesn’t exist?” asked Pete Hegseth, who, before he was leaking war plans in group chats wrote a book urging parents to flee the public schools in favor of classical Christian education.
Much about what these guys (and it always seems to be guys) are arguing is contradictory, even bonkers. In his recent book Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage honcho Kevin Roberts accuses public schools of churning out students who manage to be both corporate drones AND Marxist revolutionaries, “ideal cogs in a globalist, Uniparty economic system,” as he puts it. Yet however nonsensical such claims may be, the critique of schools as overly focused on job training is worth reckoning with.