No one likes airplane food—which almost inevitably means small portions, limited options, and the unavoidable presence of chicken.

Despite bland offerings, passengers are usually just hungry enough—or just bored enough—to eat anyway.

In K-12 (primary and secondary) schools in the U.S., academic standards are the equivalent of airline food.

State policy-makers are responsible for setting standards in each major subject to outline the topics they want educators to teach students. The standards are broad, often lacking details—but, like airline passengers, teachers and students are a captive audience with few alternatives.

But where airplane meals and academic standards differ, though, is that standards reflect the goals and targets state policy-makers believe students should learn. Whether or not teachers actually adhere closely to those standards in classrooms, these academic topics are the very ideas that policy-makers want to represent the K-12 schools in their state (one hopes Delta does not want to be represented by their chicken).

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The goals in some U.S. states differ strikingly one from another in a way that highlights the strong undercurrent of radical racial and gender ideology in some state school systems. For example, the academic standards for social studies and ethnic studies in California and Minnesota stand in stark contrast to the social studies standards in Louisiana and South Dakota (a fact highlighted in my chapter for Reclaiming Classical Education, a work just published by Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or MCC).

In the former two states, policy-makers emphasize intersectionality, power structures (real and perceived), and activism.

Minnesota lawmakers want educators to apply the state’s ethnic studies standards to every subject, requiring everything from geography to math to include distracting and racist lessons in critical race theory. California even assigns students to read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, a highly cynical take on American history that has been debunked by historians—including those on the left of the ideological divide.

Conversely, the standards in Louisiana and South Dakota celebrate America’s commitment to freedom and representative political systems—even while acknowledging that no nation is perfect.

In the introduction to his state’s standards, Louisiana state superintendent Dr Cade Brumley writes, “The quest for freedom is a hallmark of the American story,” a statement directly opposed to Zinn’s contention that the history of the West is little more than “fierce conflicts of interest” between “conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.”

MCC’s volume centered on classical education, and this type of academic instruction has a great deal to offer state policy-makers as they design state standards.

Policy-makers in Louisiana and South Dakota should be applauded for their rigorous standards that include instruction on the timeless ideals of individual liberty and the virtues that underpin a free society. Still, classical schools are known by a specific set of instructional goals and techniques that transcend even America’s prodigious history.

Classical schools teach Latin and Greek to students so that they can read original sources in the original languages. These schools base their teaching on the “Great Books,” works by the likes of Shakespeare and Homer and Plato, books containing the very concepts on which the edifices of America’s culture of freedom and liberty rest.

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These schools are also typically low tech, de-emphasizing the use of laptops and cell phones. Instead, they focus on etiquette, something sorely lacking both in academia and politics today.

State lawmakers in the U.S. could elevate their standards by integrating the ideas used in classical schools into their standards-setting practices. Yes, some teachers may ignore the content requirements, but the standards would still set high goals for students, demonstrating that lawmakers want students to learn about the true, the good, and the beautiful—and that they want their state to be represented by schools that teach such things.

Louisiana and South Dakota are not too far off. Their standards use words like “virtue” and “respect” in the context of American history and civil interactions.

More importantly, classical content is the haute cuisine of education. The books and challenging memorization assignments are rich in wisdom and imagination and have inspired students for generations.

Schools serving the equivalent of airline food are starving their students. For the sake of students and the health of education, lawmakers in the U.S. and around the globe should make use of what classical education has to teach each of us.