The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 13 – Jeremy Tate

Episode 13: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

Dr. Jeff interviews Jeremy Tate, an educational innovator and founder of the Classic Learning Test (CLT). Tate discusses his view that the American education system, heavily influenced by the College Board’s SAT and ACT, has become hostile to the Christian intellectual tradition by systematically censoring theistic content.

He explains that he created the CLT as an alternative college entrance exam to reintroduce the Western canon, philosophy, and intellectually rigorous texts from a variety of thinkers, including Christian and secular ones. The conversation also covers the importance of a “liberal arts” education for creating free-thinking individuals, the growing school choice movement, and practical advice for parents and young adults on how to engage with classical literature and ideas.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. Every episode we visit with major thought leaders to show how worldview changes everything. In this episode, we’re talking to Jeremy Tate. Now, this guy is an educational innovator. I would say he’s an educational disruptor. He started to realize that even the SAT and the ACT were organized in an anti-Christian fashion, believe it or not. And so he developed a new way of testing that colleges are beginning to embrace. This is incredible.

And in the process, we’re going to comment on everything from what kind of education should you have for your kids? What should you be reading with your children? And all of the other issues that come up. Hey, listen, kids may be 15% of the population, but they’re 100% of the future and we need to dig in. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do on the Dr. Jeff Show today. Hey, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. Jeremy Tate, thank you for being on the show today.

Jeremy Tate (01:02):
Dr. Jeff, thanks for the invite.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:04):
Listen, you are involved in what I think of as the cutting edge of education in the United States of America. And everybody listening to this says, “Oh, are we going to talk about public schools again? Are we going to talk about teachers unions again or whatever?” But the fact is, we’re talking about 15% of the population in school today, but they are 100% of the future.

And it looks like we are losing or maybe we have completely lost and political correctness has taken over. Everything has been ruined. Everybody’s just teaching to the test and we’re no longer looking for how to train people to think well, which is what they’re going to have to be able to do to solve all of the problems that we’ve created in our own generation. Yeah. And that’s kind of my little rant. And we’re going to get into that, deep into that, Jeremy, in the time we have together.

(02:00):
And I want people to know we’re going to focus on solutions here. What can you do? How do you raise your kids differently? How do you just, those kinds of things. So we’re going to get into all that, right?

Jeremy Tate (02:14):
Looking forward to it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:16):
Yeah. But before we do it, I want to just go back and let people get to know you a little bit, because you’re an educational innovator. There’s some people out there saying, “Well, let’s just manage our decline as well as we can.” And you’re not one of those guys. So tell me a little of your story.

Jeremy Tate (02:36):
Yeah. I went to seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, which is a satellite at the Orlando campus. And then I spent about eight years in the public school arena, and I spent two years at a private Christian school. And then I actually launched an alternative to the SAT and ACT. And I did that because I realized that the main driver, the main player in American education is actually the college board. They are the entity that owns the AP test, the PSAT, the SAT.

And you said in the intro, tests tend to drive curriculum. And what tests drive curriculum more than any other? It’s the PSAT and the SAT. And these are tests that exclude any source material at all that would even be theistic, much less distinctly Christian. And so then you pause and think about that for a minute. We have the most powerful education company in America that censors the entire Christian, Catholic, theistic, intellectual tradition completely. And it leaves students with a sense of the world that’s very flat and kind of one dimensional.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:37):
Jeremy, I was visiting another country. I won’t say which one right now, because we do have people listening from all over the world. But in this country, the people there were telling me, they’re having a very hard time getting their students, even though they study hard, sometimes they’ll study 14 hours a day. Having a very hard time when they graduate, getting them jobs with international companies. And they asked me why this was so difficult.

And I said, “I’m sorry to tell you, but I think your curriculum teaches your students how to solve problems that are known problems.” And in the real world and business, you’re in business, I’ve started several businesses, none of the problems you get to solve are ones that are solvable, right? They’re all brand new. You have to be able to think in order to be able to react. You can’t just teach to the test.

(04:29):
But you just kind of said in an offhanded way, you started an alternative to the SAT and the ACT. I find that absolutely fascinating because that is America, right? Every high school kid who intends to go to college studies for one of those tests. And you’re telling us that they actually are organized in such a way that they are even anti-Christian?

Jeremy Tate (04:58):
Oh, absolutely. CLT has met, college board has what’s called a sensitivity committee. And so any test as it’s in development goes through a sensitivity process and any passage that could offend any student for any reason is excluded. This would even include a passage that refers to two married parents that would offend students who have divorced parents.

And so you end up with these really bland, meaningless passages at best, they’re meaningless. At worst, they’re actually politically biased. Bernie Sanders was on the SAT in the summer of 2019. And so this is what students are reading.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:34):
But he offends me, but I don’t count on this sensitivity. Okay. Just clarify.

Jeremy Tate (05:43):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:45):
So yeah, tell me a little bit more because you mentioned specifically the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition ends up getting excluded from these tests. And the way I understand the world is there really is not much of an intellectual world or even a Western tradition of any kind if you exclude that.

Jeremy Tate (06:05):
Oh yeah. I mean, Christian dumb in the medieval air invented the university. That’s a historical fact. It is. And so, and you even look at the time of the American Revolution or a giant like Frederick Douglass. What was education to Frederick Douglass? It was fundamentally the way a person became free, became liberated. He described education as making a man unfit to be a slave. It was the meat and potatoes of education for Frederick Douglass was philosophy, rhetoric, logic, grammar, religion.

All of those things have been entirely removed from mainstream education. We still call it education, but everything that used to define education has been removed, almost everything, including now less and less history, things like penmanship completely gone, geography almost entirely gone. And so we have this very vague idea that education is supposed to create these critical thinking skills, but it’s pretty ambiguous what even that refers to.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:10):
I want to talk about that a little bit more because I think one thing that I did not understand when I was in college at least, until I heard a lecture as a graduate student, when people talk about liberal arts education, they shouldn’t mean liberal as in training kids to become politically liberal. They mean liberal as in an education for a free person.

Jeremy Tate (07:32):
Yes. Absolutely.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:34):
Yeah. So what we’re losing here is not just good schooling. What we’re losing here is the capacity of an entire generation to live as free people.

Jeremy Tate (07:47):
Yep. Yes, for sure. And they won’t even know it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:51):
And they won’t even know it. So essentially, they’re enslaved.

Jeremy Tate (07:58):
Yeah. And unaware that they’re enslaved, for sure. The end goal of education and mainstream American education is not at all even slightly what Frederick Douglass and other intellectual giants thought that it was, which was to liberate a person, which includes creating the human disciplines to master the kinds of passions and impulses that enslave people, right? That we’re not just going to be beholden to our impulses or desires to watch something or do something or whatever else.

It’s this paradox that of course is embedded in the Christian intellectual tradition, but it extends beyond that, that with discipline, with virtue is actually the road and the path to human freedom. Those concepts are entirely foreign to a student who goes through a K through 12 education in America.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:45):
Oh no, in my education, I learned that it’s Christians that keep people bound. It’s Christianity that keeps people down and something else is going to set us free. But is that how it’s happening today?

Jeremy Tate (09:02):
Yeah. Again, I think there’s also, it can sound kind of doomsday. I think some of the things I’m saying, but I think there’s also really a mass exodus. And I don’t fault, I don’t want to get on the show and just hammer against public schools. I’m not inherently against public schools.

I am against any kind of education that excludes the things that every other generation called education, which again, includes logic, includes scripture, includes religion, includes philosophy, includes the fundamental questions of human existence, right? There is no education without that. And so we continue to call this thing education, but it would be unrecognizable to any other generation, especially America’s founders.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:45):
Jeremy, as you’re talking about that, I’m thinking of, let’s say we were to come up with something and be able to say to the public school system, we can guarantee that this will improve students’ ability to think critically and to be prepared for college, but it is inherently, there are spiritual aspects to it. There’s scripture in it. We’re talking about people who were Christians in the past. Would it be excluded, do you think, because there is kind of an anti-Christian bias, or do you think people would be open if it was proven to work?

Jeremy Tate (10:24):
A big movement that’s just groundswelling right now in the United States, which is really good. And in some ways, Western Europe, we typically think of Europe as secular Western Europe. In some ways they’re actually, one of our employees at CLT grew up in Germany. He went to a Christian school and his parents had choice.

They could go to a state school, a Catholic school, they could go to Protestant school. His parents sent him to a Protestant school and he learned scripture there. They had that kind of freedom too. In America, we don’t have that. We all have to buy into a school system that excludes the things that, again, most nearly every generation believed was most important for students.

And so right now, the overwhelming majority of Americans are supportive of the school choice movement. And I know some people have concerns that there’s going to be strings attached, but at the end of the day, we need a system that funds families to make the educational decisions themselves. If it’s homeschool, if it’s Christian school, or fine, if they want to go to a state school, but know what it is and know what kind of education it’s offering.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:27):
The brilliance of that is that you’re getting to make the case to parents who are the ones who care the most about the kids, rather than trying to make the case to teachers’ unions. And I know I’m going to get a letter because there are people who are members of teachers’ unions and they’ve been helpful in their career who are watching this right now. But the truth is, they’re not their children. It’s the parents who should have the opportunity to make the case. Why is that so controversial?

Jeremy Tate (12:00):
It really shouldn’t be. And like anything else, I mean, it’s funny, the federal government itself, when it wants something done with excellence, this is even the case with defense, right? It’s the reason why we have massive corporate empires like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, they want something done excellently. They outsource it to the private sector where there’s this thing called competition.

And so when schools are forced to compete among each other for students, that creates excellence at the schools, but it also allows them to craft curriculum around the demands and the needs of parents. And if parents say, “I want my student,” which most parents do to have scripture, to have a foundation in logic, in rhetoric, in grammar, they’re going to offer those things. And when the schools offer those things, parents are going to send their students there. That’s the system that we need in the United States.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:49):
Yeah. I think it sounds great. Now in Colorado, we have a charter school movement. Most of the charters are classical schools in nature, and I think that’s partly the result of people like you and other people, Hillsdale College and others coming in to help. But talk to the parents for a minute who live in states where that’s just not going to happen, where they go to the representative and say, “We should have school choice.” And the representative says, “Oh, aren’t you cute? Sit back down.”

Jeremy Tate (13:22):
Yeah, that’s great. Typically, we don’t think of mainstream publicly funded schools as a monopoly, but it’s a monopoly. When you don’t have to compete, when the price point is $0 to enter the marketplace, when you think about the irony that the public schools enter the marketplace at $0 and there is still something like a mass exodus from these schools right now.

Just the other day, I interviewed Cornell West who identifies politically far on the left, right? And he is deeply saddened that you have a movement, a disrupt text movement among public schools in the United States to get rid of texts like the Odyssey, right? Books that speak to the very most basic human experiences and longings.

And so there is a war against, no doubt, the Western canon against stories like the Odyssey that have been passed down for nearly 3,000 years. And I think as parents wake up to the reality that there’s an army of really activist fringe teachers that are at war with the kind of texts that have been valued and cherished by every generation.

(14:31):
People are waking up to this and I think more and more congressmen are realizing that it’s not good for their own career to be opposed to school choice. So I’m optimistic that the winds are going to turn on this.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:43):
Yeah. Well, certainly a lot of progress has been made since the time that I was in school. And I still want to get to this, what is different about the classical learning test than the ACT and the SAT. I want to talk about that in just a minute because I think people who have children at home right now are going to be really interested in that.

But first, I shared this article with you, why American children stop believing in God. And it’s that study from the American Enterprise Institute, which is a conservative leaning think tank, I would say, but highly respected and extraordinarily adept, very academically appropriate. When they come up with a piece of research, it’s not just a push pull to try to promote a political candidate. It’s real stuff. And they said, “The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state.” At least that’s the way National Review summarized the article.

(15:46):
And they said that children in this generation are farther from God than any previous American generation. And the reason is because of schools. For those parents who are, maybe they’re young and they’ve got a four or five year old, they’re just getting into this. What’s going on in those schools that causes children to turn out that way?

Jeremy Tate (16:12):
Yeah, this is such a good question. And I’m a fan of AEI. They’ve been great to CLT and National Review as well. You think about the history of compulsory education in America. It’s a fascinating story, but really, the first kind of compulsory education laws post-Civil War in New England, and really nobody at the time, very few, envisioned education without religion.

What ended up happening is there were denominational infighting in terms of doctrinal distinctives, which led as a temporary fix for some school districts to say, “We won’t have any of the religion taught at all in schools, and that’ll be separate, that’ll be Sunday school.” That became kind of an unintentional model that has now become the norm, so much so that we don’t even think about how strange it is.

And so I think because we experienced this ourselves, and I think I went to high school in the 1990s and elementary school in the 1980s, it’s really different now than it was even then. I think at a lot of institutions, school districts, there’s actually a hostility now that is less and less subtle that parents need to waken up to them.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:26):
How would they see that hostility? I mean, if they go in for parent teacher conference, the teacher’s not going to say, “I really can’t stand your kid because he tells me he goes to church.” How’s that really coming across?

Jeremy Tate (17:41):
Yeah. I’m thinking about the high school football coach, I believe in Washington who got permanently fired for praying after games on the 50 yard line. It wasn’t required for any players. Players were welcome to join the coach as he prayed himself after games to thank God for the opportunity to play football. He was warned not to do it. He continued to do it to exercise his constitutional right and was fired for that reason. So I think we have things like that that happen and it wakes people up, like, “That’s really strange.” He’s fired for exercising freedom of religion.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:18):
No one was required, right?

Jeremy Tate (18:20):
No one was required. Yeah, of course not.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:22):
Did the players get somehow subtly punished if they didn’t participate?

Jeremy Tate (18:28):
No, I don’t think that the players were.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:31):
So they were completely free. Do it or don’t do it. It’s not going to affect whether you start anything like that. And he was still fired.

Jeremy Tate (18:40):
Yeah. Yeah. And still fired. And so you see stories like this with students bringing their Bible to school and being told to put it away. And when I was at a public school, there was a group of teachers that would get together once a week around the flagpole before school and pray along with students. And it was certainly frowned upon by the administration that was not appreciated. And then there are all kinds of things, especially when we talk about human sexuality. It’s really odd for the public schools to be going lower and lower in grade levels to teach kids basic things about human sexuality.

And regardless of where anybody stands on those questions, it’s not the job of the state to teach students, especially young people about these things. And then if somebody maintains a traditional Christian perspective, that is in some circles now considered hate speech. And so there is a kind of a secular orthodoxy that’s being imposed. And your job is on the line if you speak out against it in any capacity.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:54):
Because I see all of the things you’re talking about, but it’s just so hard for me to imagine sometimes. Take us inside the mind of a school administrator who looks at those kids around the flagpole and says, “That’s dangerous.” They’re not burning anything, they’re not spray painting anything, they’re not hitting anybody. Why are they such a threat?

Jeremy Tate (20:19):
Yeah. So I think the answer is probably going to sound kind of strange. And so I would argue that education itself is inherently religious. You cannot change that because education is inherently about formation. It teaches a young person about ultimate values. It gives them a sense of justice, what is right and wrong, the things they ought to believe in, the things they ought not to believe in.

And so when you strip traditional religion from education, which is what we’ve done in America, you’re going to get something that’s going to emerge that looks like, kind of, a new religion. And that is actually what is being perpetuated in mainstream education, right? There’s an ultimate value, which is tolerance for all things, except of course, traditional ideas or traditional religion. And so you have something that looks a lot like kind of a new, kind of ambiguous religion, but to be outside of, but it has boundaries of orthodoxy. And to be outside of that is to be cast out.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:24):
The theme of this show, and I don’t think I mentioned this at the beginning, but the theme of the show is, worldview changes everything. And what you’re telling us is that the schools are not a neutral place. They have excused anything related to a Christian, Catholic, intellectual tradition in order to invite a whole new religion.

Jeremy Tate (21:49):
Yeah. I would say so without a doubt. There’s not a ground. If you’re a professing Christian as I am, there’s not a category for neutrality. And so I actually would respect it far more if a university like the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s vision, super clear in its mission, and it was not intended in any way to be a Christian institution. It’s intended to be a secular public institution. And it’s actually like the intellectual honesty there is really refreshing.

And so I think trying to claim this ground of neutrality, which really doesn’t exist, I think parents need to wake up to where they’re sending their kids. And again, Dr. Jeff, I want to be really, really careful and not sounding like I’m, because I know a lot of your listeners are probably sending their kids to a public school. I don’t want to slam that.

(22:40):
I think there are a ton of teachers out there that are believers that love children that are doing really, really good work. I think in terms of the institutions as a whole though, are becoming more and more hostile to traditional belief systems.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:56):
Yeah. Well, we want to be able to speak the truth, even if there isn’t something immediately that we think we can or should do about it. So I appreciate that. I’ve had children go to all different kinds of schools, homeschool, classical school, public school, and different students, different of my children in different situations in life, different forms of education seemed vast, but I want to know what the pros and cons are of every choice that I make.

I appreciate your mentioning that there’s so many teachers who are doing such a good job in these school situations. They love kids. They’re trying to teach them as well as they can. They may have a lot of constraints on that, but they are doing the very best they can and we want to appreciate and honor what they’re doing.

Jeremy Tate (23:55):
Yeah. And my children as well went to years of public school. In fact, in our last year of public school, one of the teachers, it wasn’t on the recommended reading list. I can’t believe she did it, but praise God she did. She had the students reading and she was reading out loud to them, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and talked to other parents and there was a concern she could lose her job over that. But she had the conviction of, no, this is a timeless classic that is worthy of a student’s time and attention, and I’m going to make sure that they don’t miss it.

And so I appreciate when teachers are doing that. And again, there’s a lot to be optimistic about. I think there’s enough pressure on the system right now. And again, when we talk about this from the political front, it’s not going to go well for legislators who are opposed to school choice across the political spectrum more and more, across different demographics, race, whatever. People want school choice. The parents want to say, no, we’re in the driver’s seat here. Thank you state, but we’ve got this.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:03):
Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that’s that level of responsibility and grit. That’s huge. Okay. We’ve been promising this since the beginning of the show that we’re going to talk about this critical learning or classical learning test.

Jeremy Tate (25:18):
Yeah, classic.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:20):
Classic?

Jeremy Tate (25:21):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:22):
So this is an alternative test to ACT, SAT. I have heard about it because of an involvement that I have with the Christian University and I’m excited to hear about it because you’re going to talk to us about what you really want to be testing kids on if you want them to be prepared for true success later in life. Yeah.

Jeremy Tate (25:51):
Well, thanks so much for the opportunity. And I was mentioning earlier, college board and ACT have a sensitivity committee where they are asking, could this possibly offend a student in any way? CLT actually has almost the exact opposite process. If a text can’t possibly offend anyone, it’s probably not worthy of a student’s time and attention. Students are actually surprised when they take the CLT.

We’re not just putting students in front of C.S. Lewis. We are, he’s one of our most popular authors, but students are also encountering Nietzsche, Darwin. They’re encountering some atheists and secular philosophers as well. The mark of an educated human being is to be able to read and engage and understand an idea without having a meltdown, without being so offended that you just can’t handle life, right? If you can’t handle life when you read something that you don’t agree with, you’re probably not ready for college.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:40):
And you’re probably not ready for a job. You could never run for office, you could never be successful, you could never make money. Yeah, just, boy oh boy.

Jeremy Tate (26:54):
Yeah. But it’s been shocking. I remember a couple of years ago, CLT has 200 partner colleges, the overwhelming majority with the exception of Christopher Newport, we love them, love Paul Tribble. He’s the president there. The overwhelming majority are private Catholic or Christian colleges. And this was fascinating. I was presenting to a public university two years ago and the VP of enrollment says, “We couldn’t possibly allow this as a college entrance exam.”

I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “You’ve got C.S. Lewis and John Paul II.” And I said, “Wait, you’re not going to allow the test because we’re including C.S. Lewis and John Paul II. Two of the greatest intellects of the entire 20th century. Why? Because they love Jesus. Is that the crime they committed?” And so there’s this assumption that it’s just okay to censor people because they’re people of faith, because they’re people who happen to love Jesus. This is wild. And he really believed that that was a ground to stand on. It’s not.

(28:00):
That’s cherry picking, that is censorship. That is not America. I’m not saying you have to agree with John Paul II or C.S. Lewis, but for heaven’s sakes, give them a seat at the table. And so CLT’s taken that hit. We understand that big public universities are not going to give us a lot of love so long as we keep putting people like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and Chesterton and Flannery O’Connor on our author bank and on the test itself.

But we have no intention of backing down from that. We have an absolute groundswell of parents and students who are enthusiastic. You would never think parents or students could be so enthusiastic about a test, but they understand that CLT is a disruptor in education. If you change the test, you change everything else. I often give this analogy of what if the SAT and ACT started requiring students to demonstrate French proficiency.

(28:59):
There was a required French proficiency component. What would happen to American education? Well, we all know everybody would start taking French, right? Same thing with the classics. If you put the good stuff back on the most important test, the good stuff will reappear in the curriculum as well. And so that’s kind of the concept with it.

And parents who have said, enough cancel culture, enough attacking the classics, these are timeless texts that every other generation responsibly passed down and preserved. We need to do our part as well. So it’s fun. It’s fun being in a space that’s disruptive, that’s going against the establishment. And also that CLT has appeared to reasonable people as kind of the lone entity that’s open-minded. We’re not censoring atheists. We’re putting Nietzsche on our test. We’re putting Darwin on our test. The censorship is coming from the college board. It’s coming from ACT.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:52):
Well, I don’t know if I could pass your test, Jeremy, but I definitely love all the authors that you’ve mentioned. And there is a tremendous 20th century intellectual tradition that is largely Christian. And the only way to ignore it is to somehow censor it or ban it. So how are parents going to find out about CLT?

Jeremy Tate (30:18):
Yeah. CLTexam.com is a great place to start. We’ve got a podcast as well that has grown like wildfire. We actually had Cornell West just the other day. And I think that’s really, really important for people to not make this a political issue. Cornell West would identify about as far on the political left as you could, but he believes that the classics are a hill he is willing to die on.

We don’t cancel the Odyssey. We don’t cancel these books that have been passed down from generation to generation. And so we’re trying to lock arms with like- minded people who believe in the value of tradition, the tradition that gave birth to America in the first place. The podcast is Anchored. You can find that wherever you get your podcasts. I tweet probably more than I should. My Twitter handle is @JeremyTate41. It’s been an effective platform to kind of get our message out. And so thank you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:09):
Yeah, that’s great. So you’ve got the test. The podcast, your tweeting, which I don’t do anymore.

Jeremy Tate (31:19):
If you don’t tweet, I say often, it’s kind of like smoking cigarettes or something. If you don’t smoke, don’t start. It’s a toxic environment, for sure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:27):
That was an easy one to give up for Lent. It’s easier than my other habits. So listen, we’re kind of now in this place where I think a lot of parents may be saying, “All right, this is a problem. I see this. I think you’re right. I’ve suspected this is an issue. With my time that I have with my children at home, what should I be asking my children? Should I be reading with them?” Can you just give us a little bit of insight into that?

Jeremy Tate (32:02):
Yeah. I think there’s a will, but often there’s a really understandable fear that parents have of, how would we possibly adjust and change our lives? We’re barely scraping by as it is. How would we possibly homeschool? How would we possibly afford to send our kids to a classical Christian school? I find that when parents take the bold step of saying, “We’re going to do this at whatever cost to ourself,” that God blesses their courage and their willingness to step out on faith and to do that.

And having taught for 8, 10 years, you can do a ton at home. Even right now with COVID has actually opened up the opportunity for parents to be able to both work and stay on top of their responsibilities at work and also homeschool effectively. And we homeschool too. We send two to a private Christian school. One is only 11 months, so he’s not quite ready yet.

(33:02):
But it’s been really, really beautiful the way that we can learn together as a family. There’s beauty to being able to sit down and we read the entire Chronicles and Narni together. We read the entire Lord of the Rings together. Those are memories that we have. It’s changed the culture of our home. So I would encourage parents to take a step of faith and consider the possibilities.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:25):
So they’re going to have to make some life changes to be able to do that. So yeah, begin praying for agreement between the spouses for some breakthroughs and maybe connections with other people, because you’re going to need a lot of support to make a big change like that.

If you’re not in a place where you can make that change, or even if you are, you want to be reading with your kids, pick up those great classics. Chronicles and Arnie is great to start with. Start a reading time every evening instead of being around the television, things like that. A lot of that’s just common sense, but maybe it’s not so common when everybody’s having to move about so frantically and things seem so uncertain. Yep.

Jeremy, a lot of the people who are following this show are just in college or just out of college, just in their 20s, trying to make sense of how they want their lives to be. And I’d love for you to speak to them for a minute. This is just kind of a mentoring moment where you have a chance to speak into this next generation. What would you say?

Jeremy Tate (34:32):
Yeah. Dr. Jeffs, yeah. Thrilled to have the opportunity to do that. Especially if you’re in your 20s just out of college and you don’t have kids yet. I am really grateful. I was 21 and made this really wild, crazy road trip, actually from Louisiana all the way to Alaska. Spent a summer there, lived in a tent, showered maybe once every couple weeks.

But I read for five, six hours a day. I remember reading all of Crime and Punishment in a few days in a tent. You’re not going to get that opportunity later on in life when the responsibilities pile up. And so I would say, live the adventure, go be Frodo, tackle your dreams, do something great, but also immerse yourself in the timeless ideas that really are worthy of your time and attention.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:24):
That is so cool. Be Frodo. Live the adventure.

Jeremy Tate (35:29):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:29):
Yeah. Yeah. And the great ideas that it is the case that truth really exists and that people who’ve trained their minds well can access chunks of it in a way that will change their lives and help them change other people’s lives.

Jeremy Tate (35:47):
Yeah. What won’t go away for the most part, this isn’t entirely true. There are some great storytellers that are not believers, but really Christians like C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, they tend to tell the best stories. And regardless of your religious convictions as they may be right now, the human heart desires great stories. And so yeah, immerse yourself in those and also craft a vision. If you’re in a phase right now where you don’t have kids, start dreaming about what would you want your home life to be. That’d be my advice for sure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:27):
Yeah. Fantastic. Jeremy Tate, thank you so much for being on the Dr. Jeff Show.

Jeremy Tate (36:33):
Dr. Jeff, it has been a joy. Thank you so much for the invite.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:37):
I hope you enjoyed the Dr. Jeff Show today talking with Jeremy Tate about the future of education in our nation. There is hope. And you can hear from this guy who is this educational disruptor exactly how that’s taking place. But there are things that we need to be doing as individuals and as families. And so check out the resource page at the Dr. Jeff Show and don’t forget to check out Jeremy Tate’s work at Classic Learning Test.

Ryan Dobson (37:06):
Hi everyone. I’m Ryan Dobson from the Rebel Parenting Podcast. When my parents, Jim and Shirley Dobson sent me to the Summit Ministries Worldview Conference when I was 17, we had no idea the impact it would have on my life. It changed me so much in two short weeks. I’ve returned every summer for 34 years. This summer, your student can attend an in- person conference. That’s right, in person.

Summit Ministries Worldview Conference challenges students ages 16 to 24 to think deeper about their convictions and their faith by engaging with today’s top worldview thinkers and apologists. Can you imagine in person with other students learning about the Christian worldview? If not, they can attend Summit’s virtual experience and it’s amazing. Change your students’ life forever by partnering with Summit Ministries Worldview Conference today. Find out more by clicking the link in the show notes.