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This item, a final examination for graduating eighth grade students (or graduating high school students, depending upon which version you have) is similar to other exams from that time and purpose, and it's of interest because it's supposed to be documentary evidence of how shockingly our educations have declined over the last century or so. Why, most adults couldn't muster a passing score on this test today, people think; that mere schoolkids were expected to pass it is proof that the typical school curriculum has been steeply dumbed down over the years, pundits claim: What nearly all these pundits fail to grasp is I can't answer these questions is not the same thing as These questions demonstrate that students in earlier days were better educated than today's students. Just about any test looks difficult to those who haven't recently been steeped in the material it covers. If a 40-year-old can't score as well on a geography test as a high school student who just spent several weeks memorizing the names of all the rivers in South America in preparation for an exam, that doesn't mean the 40-year-old's education was woefully deficient -- it means the he simply didn't retain information for which he had no use, no matter how thoroughly it was drilled into his brain through rote memory some twenty-odd years earlier. I suspect I'd fail a lot of the tests I took back in high school if I had to re-take them today without reviewing the material beforehand. I certainly wouldn't be able to pass any arithmetic test that required me to be familiar with such arcane measurements as rods and bushels, but I can still calculate areas and volumes just fine, thank you. Ah, but this is high school (or even eighth grade) stuff, people say -- it's basic knowledge that everyone should remember and use. Nonsense. The questions on this exam don't reflect only items of basic knowledge -- many of the questions require the test-taker to have absorbed some very specialized information; and if today's students can't regurgitate all the same facts as their 1895 counterparts, it's because the types of knowledge we consider to be important have changed a great deal in the last century, not necessarily because today's students have sub-standard educations. Consider: To pass this test, no knowledge of the arts is necessary (not even a nodding familiarity with a few of the greatest works of English literature), no demonstration of mathematical learning other than plain arithmetic is required (forget algebra, geometry, or trigonometry), nothing beyond a familiarity with the highlights of American history is needed (never mind the fundamentals of world history, as this exam scarcely acknowledges that any country other than the USA even exists), no questions about the history, structure, or function of the United States government are asked (not even the standard Name the three branches of our federal government), science is given a pass except for a few questions about geography and the rudiments of human anatomy, and no competence in any foreign language (living or dead) is necessary. An exam for today's high school graduates that omitted even one of these subjects would be loudly condemned by parents and educators alike, subjects about which the Salina, Kansas, students of 1895 needed know nothing at all. Would it be fair to say that the average Salina student was woefully undereducated because he failed to learn many of the things that we consider important today, but which were of little importance in his time and place? If not, then why do people keep asserting that the reverse is true? Why do journalists continue to base their gleeful articles about how much more was expected of the students of yesteryear on flawed assumptions? Perhaps some people are too intent upon making a point to bother considering the proper questions. Consider the following, a certification examination for prospective teachers, prepared by the Examiners of Teachers for the Public Schools in Zanesville, Ohio, in the late 1870s: Plenty of critics maintain that most of today's teaching candidates couldn't pass this test. Well, even if that were true, it wouldn't make today's candidates all that different than their 19th century counterparts. As Joseph Crosby, the man who created the English Grammar and Orthography sections of this exam, wrote to a friend in 1876: And after all, do we really care these days whether our educators know the feminines of the words hero, bachelor, and ox? Although this exam may indicate, as Velz wrote, that [o]ur notion of nineteenth-century education as primitive and backward may need modification, perhaps what it demonstrates most is the truth of the aphorism that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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