Cornel West and Jeremy Wayne Tate:

Gov. Ron DeSantis just gave a welcome boost to the classical-education movement. He signed legislation allowing high-school students to qualify for Bright Futures scholarships, a state fund for college education, by submitting scores from the Classic Learning Test instead of the SAT alone.

This move will likely be portrayed, wrongly, as partisan and conservative. But the greatest works of civilization have always been about spurring—not preventing—radical change. They teach us about the revolutionary ideas of the past and help us better understand the present. The richest ideas of what it means to be human are those that have stood the test of time.

Many of the seminal works of literature, history, philosophy, science and theology were revolutionary in their respective ages. Turn the pages of Galileo Galilei’s “Two New Sciences” and you’ll experience the alteration of humanity’s view of itself in relation to the heavens. By disproving the then-common belief that the planets revolved around the Earth rather than the sun, Galileo laid the foundation for modern science. Isaac Newton, swept aside what remained of the Old World’s scientific superstitions—only to find himself upstaged two centuries later by Albert Einstein’s “Relativity.”

Like revolutionary ideas today, the ideas of yesterday were provocative and, in many cases, much more consequential. Galileo was put on trial because he upset the status quo. In the 13th century, Bishop Stephen Tempier of Paris condemned key works of theologian Thomas Aquinas for being too radical. Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn and civil-rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. were imprisoned for their views. In colonial America, James Madison and his co-authors feared printing their names on the Federalist Papers, so they hid under aliases. Even the most mild-mannered of philosophers stirred trouble for thinking against the grain. Plato watched his great teacher Socrates put to death for his teachings.