Wednesday 20th of August 2025
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

educating the next batch of US soldiers....

 

Future military officers and the children of U.S. service members may soon be able to satisfy government testing mandates with a new test that prioritizes traditional math and the Great Books. Because tests strongly influence what teachers teach, this would encourage more traditional, less politicized instruction for the 70,000 or so children attending Department of Defense, or DODEA, K-12 schools.

 

Defense Department May Adopt Pro-America Test For K-12 Schools, Military Academies

BY: JOY PULLMANN

This would encourage more traditional, less politicized instruction in military-run public schools and boost recruitment from the most pro-America demographics.

 

The current Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) moving through Congress would require DODEA schools to offer 11th-grade students the college admissions test of their parents’ choice. This would allow students to take the Classic Learning Test, a Great Books competitor to the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. NDAA is a must-pass annual military spending bill. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., successfully added that amendment during markup in July.

 

“Accepting the CLT alongside the SAT and ACT opens the door for talented students from every educational background. It’s about making sure our military academies attract the best and brightest,” Banks said in a statement to The Federalist. “Many homeschool students take the CLT, which focuses on reading, logic, and classic texts in a way other tests don’t. These are good skills to take to the academies and putting this into law would ensure future administrations can’t unilaterally undo what Secretary Hegseth is trying to achieve.”

The NDAA amendment occurred after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tweeted his support for accepting CLT at military academies in May. Hegseth is the coauthor, with David Goodwin, of a 2022 New York Times bestselling book about classical education, Battle for the American Mind. The book follows up on a documentary Hegseth hosted for Fox News.

 

Four Republican senators voted against another amendment from Banks to require U.S. military academies such as West Point to accept the CLT as applicants’ college entrance exam. Those are Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, and Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana. If these four had voted for this amendment, it also would be in the NDAA this year.

Of the four, only Ernst’s office replied to a Federalist request for comment, claiming the military academies already accept CLT. “My 23 years in the Army Reserves and National Guard taught me that there is no single recipe for what makes a great soldier or great leader,” said Ernst in a statement provided to The Federalist. “The service academy admissions process reflects that by accepting several standardized tests, including the Classical Learning Test, and factoring in academic success, leadership, and much more. I will always fight to ensure that no matter if you went to public, private, or home school, there is a place in the service academies for you.”

 

When The Federalist noted all the military academies and the White House publicly state all applicants must submit either the ACT or SAT in their applications, with no mention of CLT, Ernst’s office did not respond. It may be that Ernst recognizes the defense secretary can require CLT at military schools, but putting that measure in NDAA prevents a different presidential administration from revoking such a requirement. A CLT competitor, the ACT, is headquartered in Iowa. It was bought by a private equity firm last year.

An Alternative to Woke College Exams

The CLT arose 10 years ago as a market response to the increased politicization of the College Board. College Board owns the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) tests and curricula. AP classes grant high schoolers college credit for passing tests after completing AP curricula. AP classes range from American history to psychology to biology. High school students can skip up to two years of college by successfully taking many such courses.

College Board’s president since 2012, David Coleman, was a chief architect of Common Core, a national K-12 testing system the Obama administration pushed on states. During Coleman’s leadership, the SAT lost significant market share to the ACT.

Also during Coleman’s presidency, the SAT has undergone two major revisions to lower standards as U.S. students educated by Common Core and devastated by lockdowns learn less and less. The latest SAT revision shortened reading comprehension passages from 500-750 words to 25-150 words, or the length of a tweet.

 

Coleman has overseen other missteps at College Board, including adding then removing an “adversity score” to test results as an affirmative action measure, and the disastrous rollout of heavily politicized AP course redesigns. The most controversial of these were revisions to AP U.S. History (APUSH), World History, and European History courses.

These AP classes are often the last and most extensive history classes America’s future leaders take. Their revised versions require students to read reams of anti-American critical theory while short-shrifting American founding texts. Numerous historians publicly criticizedthese history classes’ revisions, arguing they were deeply biased, incomplete, of lowered quality, and riddled with factual errors.

For example, the AP European history class doesn’t mention Christopher Columbus, the AP U.S. history class “gives no hint of America’s defining culture of liberty,” and all AP history classes sideline the influence of religion on world affairs and give short shrift to the history of liberty while emphasizing “social justice,” say analyses from the National Association of Scholars. Nearly 2 million American high schoolers take an AP history exam each year, and states pay the College Board and ACT tens of millions of dollars every year via testing contracts.

The CLT announced at the end of July they will soon compete with College Board’s AP classes, offering their own dual-credit high school classes without such flaws. CLT is seeking seed funding from investors for the project, CLT founder and CEO Jeremy Tate told The Federalist in a phone interview.

“You can fundamentally reorient education with a different assessment that draws from the Western tradition,” Tate noted.

What Is Classical Education?

The United States currently has an estimated 1,500 classical schools, and they are growing exponentially. One-quarter of that total have opened since 2020, according to a 2024 study by Arcadia Education. The study projected that 1.4 million U.S. students, or 2.4 percent, will be classically educated by 2035. In the 2023-24 academic year, it estimated nearly 700,000 American children were being classically educated.

Classical education is an elite form of education for the common man. Classical schools teach the Western great books by using age-appropriate primary source documents instead of textbooks as much as possible.

Classically educated children devote core instruction time to grammar, logic, and writing, as well as traditional math and science. They memorize great poetry, hymns, folk songs, and language rules. Classical schools deliberately cultivate the virtues and habits necessary for republican self-government, such as faith in the Triune God, honesty, respect for God’s creation, hard work, attentiveness, charity towards others, and perseverance.

Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming have passed lawsmaking CLT’s college entrance and annual K-12 tests an option in their states, from school choice programs to entrance and scholarships at state higher education institutions. Approximately 300 higher education institutions currently accept CLT, which was created in 2015.

Banks has also introduced a standalone bill, the Promoting Classical Learning Act, that would require the military academies to accept CLT. That bill would also require all federally administered K-12 schools to offer CLT to all 11th-graders. The federal government directly runs both DODEA schools and Bureau of Indian Education schools.

While Congress considers such legislative options, the DOD under Hegseth is also considering exercising its authority to integrate CLT into the education institutions it runs.

“The Department is currently assessing options for accepting the Classic Learning Test (CLT) as part of Military Service Academy admissions, and as part of its broader efforts to support student pathways into college and overall career readiness,” a DOD official told The Federalist in response to a query. “While this assessment is underway, DoDEA remains committed to supporting all students in pursuing their post-secondary goals. Students who are interested in taking the CLT are encouraged to work with their school counselors, who can help to facilitate the process and provide guidance on resources and opportunities.”

 https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/19/defense-department-may-adopt-pro-america-test-for-k-12-schools-military-academies/  

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

 

great books....

Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the great books in 54 volumes.

The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series drawn from Western Civilization: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read repeatedly with respect to liberal education; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 "Great Ideas" as identified by the editor of the series's comprehensive index, the Syntopicon, to which they belonged. The books were chosen not on the basis of ethnic and cultural inclusiveness (historical influence being seen as sufficient for inclusion), nor on whether the editors agreed with the authors' views.[1]

A second edition was published in 1990, in 60 volumes. Some translations were updated; some works were removed; and there were additions from the 20th century, in six new volumes.

 History

The project for the Great Books of the Western World began at the University of Chicago, where the president, Robert Hutchins, worked with Mortimer Adler to develop there a course of a type originated by John Erskine at Columbia University in 1921, with the innovation of a "round table" approach to reading and discussing great books among professors and undergraduates.[2]—generally aimed at businessmen. The purposes they had in mind were for filling the gaps in their liberal education (including Hutchins' own, self-confessed gaps) and to render the reader an intellectually rounded man or woman familiar with the Great Books of the Western canonand knowledgeable of the Great Ideas visited in the "Great Conversation" over the course of three millennia.

An original student of the project was William Benton, who at the time was the chief executive officer of the Encyclopædia Britannica publishing company and later was a United States senator. In 1943, he proposed selecting the greatest books of the Western canon, and that Hutchins and Adler produce unabridged editions for publication by Encyclopædia Britannica. Hutchins was wary at first, fearing that commodifying the books would devalue them as cultural artifacts; but he agreed to the business deal and was paid $60,000 for his work on the project. Benton at first refused the deal on the basis that the set of works selected would be just that, artifacts, never to be read.

By chance, Adler was re-reading a source he was using for a book he was writing at the time, How to Think about War and Peace. He noted to the person who had provided the book for him that he had missed the instructive passage that this person was pointing out to him and wondered why that had happened. They realized that Adler had read the book focusing on one idea about war and peace. Adler struck on the idea of making an index for the whole set for Hutchins, so that readers could have "random access" to the works, with the desired result that they would develop a greater interest in the works.[3]

Failure to come to terms

After deciding what subjects and authors to include, and how to present the materials, the indexing part of the project was begun, with a budget of another $60,000. Adler began compiling what his group called the "Greek index" bearing on the works selected from ancient Greece, expecting completion of the entire project within six months. After two years, the Greek index was declared to be a resounding failure. The inferior terms under the Great Ideas across the centuries in which the Greek-language works were written had shifted in their significance, and the preliminary index reflected that, the ideas presented not having "come to terms" with each other.[4]

During those times, Adler had a flash of insight. He set his group re-reading each work preliminarily with a single assigned subordinate idea in mind in the form of a fairly elaborate phrase. If any instances of the idea appeared, they could collate them with co-ordinate ideas of a similar type collected the same way, use the material thus noted to better re-frame the larger idea structure and then finally start re-reading the work in its entirety with revised phrasing to do the complete indexing, of ideas.[5]

Eventual popular success

In 1945, Adler began writing the initial forms of the essays for the Great Ideas and six years and $940,000 more later, on April 15, 1952, the Great Books of the Western World were presented at a publication party in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York City. In his speech, Hutchins said, "This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind." The first two sets of books were given to Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, and to Harry S. Truman, the incumbent U.S. President. Adler appeared on the cover of Time magazine for a story about the set of works and its idea index and inventory of Western topics of thought at large, of sorts.[6]

The initial sales of the book sets were poor, with only 1,863 sets sold in 1952, and less than one-tenth of that number of book sets were sold in 1953. A financial debacle loomed until Encyclopædia Britannica altered the sales strategy, and sold the book set through experienced door-to-door encyclopædia-salesmen, as Hutchins had feared; but, through that method, 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. In 1963 the editors published Gateway to the Great Books, a ten-volume set of readings meant to introduce the authors and the subjects of the Great Books. Each year, from 1961 to 1998, the editors published The Great Ideas Today, an annual updating about the applicability of the Great Books to contemporary life.[7][8] According to Alex Beam, Great Books of the Western World eventually sold a million sets.[9] The Internet and the E-book reader have made available some of the Great Books of the Western World in an on-line format.[10]

Volumes

Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, "The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon", as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as "Man's freedom in relation to the will of God" and "The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum". They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote the 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area—Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology. 

The following list of Volumes 1 - 54 is for the first edition (1952). The second edition (1990) omitted "The Great Conversation" by the first editor-in-chief, Robert Maynard Hutchins. Because of this, a number of the volumes of the second edition are numbered one less than they are in the first (e.g., Homer is Volume 4 of the first edition but Volume 3 in the second, and so on). This is of interest because Volumes 3 - 54 are numbered in historical order of the first included author's lifetime, which may lead to some confusion for novice readers when, for example, a 17th century writer (Kepler) is included in the same volume as Ptolemy (2d century AD). 

With one exception, Volumes 3 - 54 are labelled with all of the included authors listed on the spine. Volumes 40 and 55 - 60 (second edition) are labelled by subject matter (eg. volume 57 is called "20th Century Social Sciences I"). 

The inside covers of volumes 3-60 display useful parallel timelines of all the authors lifespans entitled "Chronology of the Great Authors. The timeline is divided into three eras: Ancient Greece and Rome; The Middle Ages Through the Eighteenth Century; The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

READ MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.