CLT sat down with Stuart Williams, Founder and Executive Director of the Classic Learning Foundation, to discuss what the Foundation is, why it is being launched, and what it means for students, parents, and educators.
What is the Classic Learning Foundation? What is the purpose of it?
Stuart: The Classic Learning Foundation is being established to come alongside students and to assist them with the funding of either their secondary, pre-secondary, or collegiate education.
60 years ago, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation was established to propel knowledge forward, along with the time when the space program was becoming more of a force in the scientific community, and to support students in their ongoing education.
We see the Classic Learning Foundation as playing a similar role, but in returning us to a classic or classically based or liberal arts-oriented education. It will do so in a way that we believe supports both the most gifted students and those who have an interest in this education, but who lack the financial means.
So we’re going to be really focusing on both merit and need-based scholarship grants that will help students to obtain an education that is based on our testing, which we believe is a very objective and more sophisticated way of determining future success in some of these academic pursuits.
What has been lost in education over the last century, and what does the CLF hope to recover?
Stuart: I think that the past 50 years have been highly influenced by the idea of College Choice.
Previously, students would apply to three, four, or five schools: a safety school, a stretch school, and then some that were considered a fit.
Now you hear of students who will apply to twice that number of schools, and they believe that there’s a great deal of precision in terms of how these schools rank.
Once you start to quantify education, it’s a very small step to quantifying investment versus return.
That’s a Rubicon we crossed somewhere from the time that I was an undergraduate to the present, where people now feel that acceptance rates, college rankings, and things like that are so precise that you can go to the bank on these things.
I think that when the student loan programs were becoming much more prominent, that’s where we started looking at return on investment. And so we’ve kind of lost the thread on college education, and we feel that programs that teach you how to do a job are going to be more valuable. I would argue that has probably gone completely backwards.
I held a senior position for many years in the financial industry and had to rewrite memos that my team was putting out. These were graduates of some of the finest schools in the country, and I thought it was odd.
And it’s not fair to name names, but some very prestigious colleges were turning out students who either couldn’t read clearly or write to persuade others using the three forms of rhetoric that Aristotle wrote about 3000 years ago.
So I think we’ve lost something, and that the more we can bring students back around to the benefits and the virtues of these types of [liberal arts] education, the better.
Ultimately, I think imitation is the highest form of flattery. And if we can get more students out into the world who have benefited from these types of educational institutions, I think it will be for the betterment of our society.
To hear more from Stuart Williams and the new Classic Learning Foundation, check out the latest episode of the Anchored Podcast, where he sits down with Classic Learning Test founder Jeremy Tate to discuss the genesis of CLF, the ideas behind it, and more.
Available on the official Classic Learning Test YouTube channel, or wherever you listen to podcasts.