Under President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military academies of West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy are in for an extreme academic makeover. Not only did Pres. Trump sign an executive order to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the military, Sec. Hegseth later met with the heads of the academies to promote excellence and the restoration of academic standards.
With this push to reform, we can expect Sec. Hegseth to implement his own previous call to replace the SAT entrance exam at the academies with the Classic Learning Test (CLT), an exam rooted in the great tradition of the Western Canon.
Trump and Hegseth’s focus from the start has been removing DEI root and branch from the military. Of course, Pres. Trump and Sec. Hegseth’s focus from the start has been removing DEI root and branch from the military. Left-wing bias coupled with an intensive focus on race and gender theory over merit have infected the military and our preeminent military academies for some time. The Air Force Academy went so far as to train cadets to stop using the terms “mom” and “dad,” lest they offend the woke gender police. Meanwhile, the Naval Academy proactively fought in recent years to keep unequal race-based admissions preferences. Sadly, these are examples indicative of a larger problem.
Such reforms alone won’t reestablish the universities as centers of academic excellence. Rooting out this obvious politicization of the military academies is about much more than restoring academic standards. As my friend and the president of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, David Goodwin, put it, wokeness trains people to view America as racist and bigoted. It’s a national-security crisis when our future military officers are taught to hate the country they are being commissioned to defend.
But removing DEI from our military academies is not enough. Such reforms would prevent the academies from going further downhill. But they won’t reestablish the universities as centers of academic excellence.
Clearly, Sec. Hegseth has more in mind. As he recently said after meeting with leadership at all three academies, “My message was simple: stick to leadership, standards, excellence, war fighting, and readiness.”
To accomplish those goals, the academies need a positive academic vision—and part of that can be achieved by allowing the CLT to be accepted alongside the SAT and ACT for new applicants.
This isn’t as radical a proposal as it may seem. In his 2022 book The Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, Hegseth promoted classical Christian education (CCE) as an alternative to the secular, politicized educational models currently in vogue. He wrote positively then of the CLT,
For CCE to ultimately succeed, an entire alternate framework for the educational pipeline would need to be established. New teachers colleges, based on CCE, would need to be founded. More classical colleges and universities would need to be founded, based on the new demand. Tests like the SAT would either need to be restored to their original purpose (reasoning) or replaced with an alternative test like the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which was established in 2015 to reset the conversation around testing and entrance exams.
Sec. Hegseth understands that testing is no small matter. Tests determine what applicants spend their time studying and tell students what the university values.
Under the current applicant requirements that allow only the SAT and ACT, the military academies are implicitly sending the message that academic rigor is unimportant.
By far, the SAT is the most popular college entrance exam in America. Yet, recently, the SAT cut reading passages down from roughly 700 words to under 150 words, the length of a social-media post. Understanding complex, sustained arguments was out; scanning what amounts to an “X” post was in. Before that, the SAT removed the analogy section and excised any texts that were inspiring or consequential in an effort to produce a value-neutral exam.
Students preparing to take the CLT aren’t filled with meaningless texts designed to be forgotten as soon as the test is over. As it is currently written, the SAT instructs students in how to analyze how-to manuals and niche academic posts. It does not raise test-takers’ spirits to, in Sec. Hegseth’s words, “leadership, standards, [and] excellence.”
I founded the CLT to do the exact opposite. The texts are longer and more robust, rooted in the great tradition and focused on virtues, including nobility, courage, self-sacrifice, and command—exactly what the military academies should be focused on. Students preparing to take the CLT aren’t filled with meaningless texts designed to be forgotten as soon as the test is over. They are instead called to contemplate the persuasive power of Pericles, the beauty of Shakespeare, the simple profundity of Tennyson, and other must-read authors and works.
Allowing the military academies to accept the CLT alongside the SAT and the ACT won’t reform these storied institutions in and of itself. But it will go a long way in advancing Sec. Hegseth’s positive vision to replace the divisive and substandard contemporary education regime with inspiring classical education.
Jeremy Tate is the founder of CLT, the Classic Learning Test.
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Jeremy Tate
