Florida continues to shake up the educational status quo. On Friday, the state is expected to approve a new college entrance exam, the classical learning test, or CLT. If the exam is approved, state universities will accept it alongside the SAT and the ACT in their admissions process.

The exam assesses the test-taker’s math, reading, writing, and grammar skills. That in itself doesn’t distinguish it in any significant way from its competitors in the SAT and ACT. But one serious difference comes in what test-takers read. The CLT makes greater use of classic texts from Western and world history, assigning excerpts from St. Augustine, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Darwin.

This shift in readings might not seem that important. But it holds the potential to act as the tip of a much bigger, much more consequential iceberg. Teachers and students take into account the content and form of important standardized exams. How students perform matters to schools for their own reputation and, sometimes, for their funding. How students perform on these exams also can matter greatly for those students’ futures, especially in whether they go to college and to what particular school.

A growing place for the CLT, then, could greatly affect curricula throughout Florida and the country. That change could support a return to studying the kind of classic texts that this exam tends to assign. Some teachers, students, and schools might start assigning Shakespeare, Cicero, and like texts to try and score better on the new test. Even if that is their sole motive, it will expose them to great works of literature, philosophy, and theology they might not otherwise encounter.

That encounter would reap deep and broad benefits for all involved. Teachers and students would be exposed to some of the most fundamental questions of human life, as well as the most lasting engagements with those questions by human beings. What is the purpose of life? How do we understand justice and virtue? What makes something or someone beautiful? What is the relationship between different times, places, and cultures?

Serious reading about these matters from the classic canon of thinkers would push education toward cultivating students as human beings. It would make our learning less focused on only job skills or on trendy moralistic tropes. Instead, it would force teachers and students to ask what permanent truths and wise particular applications best form the human mind and heart. It would make us consider not just what is effective or efficient but what is noble and true.

Along these lines, the CLT places greater emphasis on religious texts. These texts do use a lot of Christian-based readings. This choice makes sense for our own history and context. However, the test also includes readings from Jewish writers such as Maimonides and religious figures such as Gandhi. Taken together, reading these texts calls on teachers and students to confront the question of eternity and divinity, whether God exists, and the nature of God if so. These questions do not impose a religious view but make us consider religion’s role in human formation and in our conclusions about our own existence.

Moreover, this new reading emphasis would reap political benefits. We need to learn more than how to be a (good) human. We also need to learn how to exercise our common citizenship. We are not the first generations to consider what is the best form of government, the best goals for it to pursue, and the wisest laws to create. Especially in our own time of crisis and confusion, old perspectives might help forge new answers.

Already, a number of fine schools, including Grove City, Wheaton, and Baylor University, accept the CLT from students applying for admission. Florida’s schools joining these will be a good thing. It will change what many read in their education. In so doing, it will change, for the better, the minds and hearts of students across the state and the nation. Let us hope it is just the tip of an iceberg that revolutionizes education in America.

Adam Carrington is an assistant professor of politics at Hillsdale College.