One surprising fact about the SAT: it was originally created as a tool for greater equality. In the early twentieth century, its purpose was to give students a genuine chance at prestigious universities even if they had not attended an elite prep school. The thinking was that colleges could use the SAT as another window into a student’s ability, and it is easy to understand why that idea appealed to reformers of the time.
Today, of course, we rarely talk about the SAT – or any standardized test – in those hopeful terms. Worries about fairness, bias, and equality run rampant. Such concerns have helped fuel the recent campaign to make college admissions “test-optional.” From one angle, that impulse is understandable and – like the original SAT-even admirable in its motivations. However you slice it, the stakes attached to these exams are uncomfortably high.
Still, some of the anxiety about fairness can be excessive, growing from a deeper confusion about what education is for and what it can realistically accomplish. If we treat education mainly as a tool for equality and uniform outcomes, then eliminating standardized tests begins to look tempting – even sensible. But if education is meant to cultivate moral and intellectual virtues – if it is about helping each student grow as far as he or she can – then it will never produce homogeneous results. In that sense education is almost inevitably un-equal, and that reality changes how we think about the role standardized testing should play, especially as a bridge to college.
Premodern Education: The Cultivation of the Elite
History offers a useful reminder. Education has rarely served as a leveling force. In the period I know best, the world of Greece and Rome, education – what they called paideia – was aimed quite openly at forming an elite culture. Most people were illiterate or only barely able to read by modern standards, a situation that no longer feels entirely remote.
A small minority learned enough to manage basic reading, writing, and bookkeeping for business. Generous estimates suggest perhaps ten to fifteen percent of men reached that level, roughly comparable to the share of Americans today who are truly proficient in higher mathematics. An even smaller group received training in grammar and rhetoric, the disciplines that marked genuine membership in the educated class.
Christianity, especially within the monasteries, introduced new opportunities for education, but it did not really change the fact that education was not readily accessible to most people. Christianization softened certain edges of inequality, but it did not democratize paideia. At its roots, then, Western education was never designed to increase social mobility.
A Devilish “Democracy” and a Hellish Education
C. S. Lewis noticed a similar tension in American schooling. While he is remembered mainly as a theologian and storyteller, his essays on education remain some of his sharpest social criticism. Several of them explore the uneasy relationship between democracy, equality, and learning, and nowhere more vividly than in the later epilogue to The Screwtape Letters, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.”
Written in 1962, near the end of Lewis’s life, the “Toast” was meant as a thinly disguised critique of American public education. In the original preface, Lewis admitted as much: the specific tendency he deplored had advanced further in America than anywhere else, and if he had written plainly, he said, the essay would have raised hackles in America.
In his toast, the devil Screwtape praises the aggressive egalitarian spirit that informs the modern classroom. The system, Screwtape boasts, celebrates mediocrity and quietly discourages diligent students from excelling beyond their peers. This attitude often marches under the banner of “democracy,” but it ultimately weakens democratic society, which still needs leaders, specialists, and experts – what we would simply call “elites.
Better still, from Screwtape’s point of view, the few intellectuals produced by such a system are likely to be radicals – “prigs and cranks,” as Lewis puts it – who serve Hell’s purposes in their own way. At a deeper level, Screwtape delights in egalitarian education because it advances a broader movement toward discrediting every form of human excellence, whether moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. The goal is to level everyone out: “all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equal.” The line faintly echoes Orwell’s Animal Farm, and like that allegory, Lewis’s satire warns that a forced sameness can prepare the way for a new kind of tyranny. The same theme has surfaced more recently in Pixar’s The Incredibles.
Striking a Balance with Standardized Testing
What, then, does any of this have to do with exams like the SAT, ACT, or CLT?
Lewis actually mentions such university entrance tests – both the SAT and ACT were already in use by 1962 – and he notes how the language of equality was being applied to them as well. These entrance exams, he writes, were increasingly designed so that nearly everyone could enter a university “whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not.” That ethos has only grown stronger since the 1960s.
To be fair, Lewis was not indifferent to genuine concerns about justice in education. In his preface, he acknowledged another sense in which education should indeed be democratic: it ought to be open “without distinction of sex, colour, class, race or religion, to all who can – and will – diligently accept it.” Access still matters.
For that reason I do not dismiss worries about the accessibility of standardized tests. It is reasonable to ask whether the content and cultural tone of an exam unintentionally close doors, and those arguments are likely to remain with us for years. One advantage of having several accepted tests may be that no single format becomes the sole gatekeeper for every single student.
Yet it does not follow that we should be troubled when students receive different results. The very purpose of these exams is to distinguish among levels of preparation. As Nick Standlea recently observed, the goal is not simply to reward promising students or to add prestige to universities, but to help young people find a college that fits where they truly are. A test score is one more piece of information – alongside grades, recommendations, and interests – for matching students with places where they can flourish.
Lewis’s caution still speaks to the present. When equality becomes the highest and only aim of education, education begins to lose its soul. Excellence, like character, cannot be canned and mass-produced. And knowing American culture, I suspect the temptation to forget that truth will always be with us.