DeSantis wants a focus on ‘classical education.’ What does that mean?
What’s more important: Wooing campaign supporters or meeting students’ needs?
Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature have gotten a lot of attention lately for their often-successful efforts to inject high-emotion debates into Florida education, raising a ruckus over book-banning and attacks on racial and LGBTQ+ students and educators. But there’s another, quieter revolution going on — one that is attempting to remake the foundation of learning in Florida to fit a mold that breaks with most contemporary research into how young people learn and flourish.
The concept DeSantis is pushing flies under the attractive banner of “classical education,” and he’s edging it into Florida’s K-12 schools as well as colleges (in fact, his takeover of New College promises to replace the school’s “woke” focus with classical learning). As the Sentinel’s Leslie Postal recently reported, lawmakers have also adopted a standardized test known as the Classical Learning Test, or CLT, as a qualifying test for Bright Futures scholarships in addition to the ACT and SAT. The governor has said he wants to use the same test in college admissions. In the 2022 elections, he also pushed slates of School Board candidates who (among other things) promised to force more classical standards into local curriculum choices.
At first blush, it seems like an appealing direction for schools. Classical programs focus on fundamental skills for all students, taught in a very structured way that emphasizes “great works” of history and rarely strays beyond the boundaries of textbooks. Reputable studies have shown that many students who attend high-quality, classical-education schools do better on standardized tests and sometimes in college. Who could possibly argue with that?
Well, for starters, most of the educational research of the past five or six decades — which has shown that most children learn better when classes stimulate their natural curiosity, and when lessons have relevance to current events and their everyday lives. Classes, especially at the elementary level, often encourage students to integrate skills from one subject to another (one popular integrative model engages students to view science, technical and math-based skills in combination with arts-based lessons, the so-called STEAM approach). There’s also a focus on critical thinking and problem solving skills — which many have interpreted as “woke ideology,” since students often explore current events through the lenses of the skills they are learning.
That doesn’t preclude them from studying the classics; many of them take on new vibrance when viewed in a modern light. (Beatrice and Benedick, the couple at the center of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” is one of our favorite examples of this — characters who would be perfectly at home in any modern drama).
But classical education models discourage that kind of integration. They unabashedly focus on historic Western civilization and rely heavily on rote memorization and facts-based testing.
That leads students to views that are also out-of-date. Since many of those great texts were crafted in theocratic societies, they tend to be more overtly religious — and the religion is almost exclusively Christianity, which is tantamount to virtue. The roles of women and ethnic minorities are far less likely to be included in lessons, and there is little mention of marginalized communities. Students are rarely exposed to the perspective of someone who is “other,” through their ethnicity or sexuality.
There are certainly ways to adapt classical learning models to avoid these pitfalls, and many modern proponents say they’ve done just that. But DeSantis’ version of classical education is far more rigid than those idealistic models — and his apparent allergy to diversity, equality and inclusion plays into that: External reviews of common, contemporary classical curriculum show that they downplay the contributions of women and minorities — lessons that many classical educators describe as a “focus on victimhood,” but are really a welcome dose of reality that matches well in a world where women are more likely than men to attend college, and are moving closer to parity in formerly male-dominated professions like medicine and law. Many of the classical texts were originally written by and for the elite class in Eurocentric cultures, and downplay the reality of poverty and racial discrimination.
Florida doesn’t need to roll back the clock on its education models — especially not to give DeSantis bragging rights to a “revolution” that plays well to his base, but undermines the potential of Florida students to explore the world around them with a questioning, critical and informed mindset. It may sound good on the campaign trail, but that shouldn’t be the critical test.
Florida parents should make it clear that the governor and his hand-picked School Board candidates should keep his ambitions out of their children’s classrooms.