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As a Western European casually reading headlines on social media, it’s mind boggling what’s happening now in Florida. From my outside perspective it seems like Florida is shaping up to be a fascist Christian state, with all kinds of laws and policies specifically made to target racial and sexual minorities and liberals. What’s next: religious minorities and intellectuals? I’m sure it must feel the same for a lot of you across the ocean. How is it possible that people like DeSantis are in power? Is it because of years of extreme polarization? Surely it can’t be that the majority in Florida is this intolerant and hateful, right? Do you think there is even the slightest chance that DeSantis will be the next president?

The CLT was created in 2015

But the summary fails to mention by whom. The article thankfully does.

It is developed by Classic Learning Initiatives. But the company doesn't have its own wikipedia page, despite clearly having written this page. The only name listed is the "creator" of the CLT Jeremy Tate; who also doesn't have his own Wikipedia page.

That's a lot of anonymity for the company that:

"orients people to the perennial truths of the great classical and Christian tradition." - CLI Board Member and Professor of Theology Chad Pecknold

Tate, the founder and CEO of CLT said the College Board has “censored the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and other “thinkers in the history of Western thought.”.

Pecknord has previously described liberalism as a "religion" of "moral poverty" and called for "an all-embracing form of life coordinated and ordered to the love of God and neighbor"

They're hard-core Catholics trying to look generic Christian so they don't scare off the Evangelicals but also not so Christian they scare off the secular completely either.

Florida does it again.

On the one hand, I completely support competition to the college board. It's a bloated organization that profits off a monopoly. On the other hand, the CLT is some hard-right christo-fascist bullshit. So fuck the CLT

I mean… sure? Florida can do that. There’s no law or regulation that says they can’t.

But colleges outside of Florida are also 100% free to reject that as a valid standardized test. And I think the vast majority of schools that are actually worth a damn will, in fact, not accept the test.

I don’t see SAT/ACT going anywhere. CLT may start being accepted as an alternative, but it’s not going to be taken except by the most hardcore red schools. Even then, it just doesn’t make sense since every college OOS uses the SAT/ACT. Good on DeSantis for doing…literally nothing helpful, again.

Shocked the lawmakers could find it

It doesn't test Latin? I went to a "classical education" school and Latin was a big deal. Our senior curriculum was, IIRC, AP English Literature, AP Calculus, AP Chemistry, AP French Language, AP Macroeconomics, Latin, Ethics (once? a week), Art History (twice? a week, one semester), Art (ditto). As you can see, our administration strongly approved of College Board's testing scheme. I think the students who had enough years of Latin had the option to move on to Classical Greek, but I was personally only in third year Latin.

Most of the faculty were very progressive, so it may not have been typical of other "classical" institutions.

I wish the article compared some of the questions of the SAT/ACT with the CLT, since I know neither.