I don’t have stats but in that period of time, but I imagine a lot of “less serious” students were dropping out by 8th grade to work in unskilled labor.
It’s a bit on the nose and does not address the causes of the lampooned state of affairs, but what makes that video even more terrifying is that it was made 8 years ago, not today.
The acting and production value was pretty good, for an indie short movie, but I'm not sure I understand what they are lampooning. Are there actually math classes even remotely like what was depicted? This seems like social criticism against something that is not actually happening.
It struck me that germ theory demands at least one question is overhauled. Yet, how would you have tested someone on the preparation for scientifically investigating germ theory?
> In contrast, the 2024 curriculum for eighth graders focuses on critical thinking, problem-solving, and the application of concepts rather than pure memorization. Modern eighth-grade assessments tend to incorporate multiple-choice questions, data interpretation, and critical analysis tasks, emphasizing skills over the retention of facts. For instance, geography in 2024 often includes understanding climate change impacts, human migration, and data analysis using technology. Students are less often asked to memorize the names of specific rivers or capitals and more often expected to understand broader concepts, such as the implications of geographic features on human civilization.
Strongly disagree. A 12 year old has zero chance of applying critical thinking or data analysis to complex subjects like climate change or human migration. It's still memorization, he's still expected to regurgitate a few lines he learned in school.
It reminds me of a time in my first college year when we had to learn underlying principles of ethics-based leadership (I kid you not). It was some kind of bullshit but everyone did his best to take it seriously.
The teacher repeated every time that he wanted us to understand broader concepts and do everything but rote learning.
Almost everyone then failed the exam (based on analysing various situations). The expected answers were word-for-word copies of the teaching material, that sometimes felt unrelated to the question. It was so absurd that we all took it as some involuntary but elaborate joke/life lesson.
Constructivists have been claiming victory since they started, despite the consistently terrible results. So they bury rote learning under a mountain of constructivist jargon, so at least they can show something.
...and what proportion of the public school teaching population is equipped to evaluate critical thinking on such subjects? They're testing for some binary issue spotting at best.
Exactly. It seems like so many people fall into the logical trap that school is about getting you to permanently memorize facts that, in a typical adult life, end up being largely trivia.
School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
That only strengthens the argument that they were better educated.
The people who built all those things and won two world wars were educated with this curriculum. They took us from horse and buggy to space travel, clearly they were doing something right with education.
Not correct. This test would have impaired Linus Pauling, who was in eighth grade in 1912. He lacked two credits in American history and was never allowed to make them up. He won two Nobel prizes in chemistry.
More broadly, home schooling seems to be more effective in 19th century America. Edison likely never took any test and definitely never attended a college that depended on it. He was home-schooled because his hearing was so bad.
You're fixating on the highest achievers of the highest achievers. Most people couldn't even read or write. Education was much less of a priority then, because you didn't require an education to have a decent life for the time period. In fact, often getting an education was a huge disadvantage - because you weren't working earlier. Skills are acquired with hands then. The sooner you put them to use, the better for your career as a factory man.
Were they better educated? In some states, it would have still been against the law to teach evolution. When I was in grade school we had court-ordered desegregation of the schools; they had Jim Crow. Schools represented very different values in those days.
Perhaps previously, but as long as there is some minimum effort schools will rarely ever fail you. High scores are rewarded but genuine intelligence (which is a variant of the norm) is stamped out as the school system fears variance.
I don't think this is true. Modern schools give many different opportunities to express intelligence in novel ways. I took music theory in high school, we wrote chorales. We had robotics too, for those that wanted it.
It's true though that if you're learning math the focus is on learning math, not theorizing new branches of mathematics. The reason being that most topics are cumulative. You can't study abstract algebra if you didn't pay attention in high school algebra. In that way, they force conformance. But largely I think this is a good thing.
This sort of thing also applies to English/Language Arts. In order to comprehend more complex media, you have to be able to comprehend simple media. Often, I hear people lament about how school didn't teach them about real life. Typically, the reason why is because they didn't pay attention in English class. There's a lot there.
Also, intelligence is virtually worthless without knowledge. Intelligence just describes potential. If you don't use that potential, it's no different than if you had no intelligence at all.
Not really. Or if I take that as face value, schools fail at it.
School mainly serves as day care and social programming: obey authority, believe what we tell you, remember what will appear on the test. Some people get more out of it than others.
Believe me, politicians also want citizens to get higher paying jobs, so they can pay more taxes.
If you've got a system that can reliably take a citizen earning $40,000/year and turn them into a citizen earning $140,000/year, governments from all over the world will beat down a path to your door. Over a 40 year career that's an extra $4 million in taxable income.
Nothing about government policies in my lifetime tells me either party or any administration makes increasing individual incomes a priority. Instead they created a system that puts young people in debt to pay for devalued degrees, then don't allow discharging that debt in bankruptcy. Telling everyone to go to college to get a degree just led to an example of Goodhart's Law -- people optimized for getting a piece of paper rather than optimizing for learning anything or at least graduating with some career skills.
I can think of many other examples of the government fleecing citizens into poverty (medical care, just to give one), enriching a few corporations and wealthy individuals at the expense of the general welfare. A government that cared about its citizens making more money wouldn't have hundreds of thousands of them living on the streets. If the government actually prioritized increasing tax revenues I can point them to some very rich companies and individuals not paying their share.
It’s interesting that those figures would not have occurred in political cartoons, and that you are told to sketch briefly, as if prone to waste time on too much detail.
I wonder to what extent the questions on this test indicate deep knowledge of the many subjects covered, vs. just following precisely those facts taught in the year's curriculum. Clearly students were expected to memorize a lot of different things by rote, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't much beyond what's covered by these questions.
This test is pretty much what I had to learn in 6th and 7th grade for grammar and history, though the exams were never that extensive but smaller and every month or so.
Some of the questions are look line bonus questions. I wouldn't have been able to place Serbia on a map in 8th grade (Montenegro didn't exist anymore/yet), but I remember a friend failing a 9th grade test where he was expected to name 30 African countries and either place them on a map or name their capital cities. The test was stupid but not that much outside expectations.
It was mostly B-grade learning: learn the rules, apply the rules or research, reformulate, present etc. Critical thinking would begin in or just before highschool.
Public education is supposed to prepare voters. I see the reliance on historical memorization as preparation to detect bullshit from political candidates.
Somebody already mentioned this inside of a thread, but I want to point it out separately: neither the blog post nor the original image mention what counts as a “passing grade”. It's not wild to think that this was very different in 1912.
I wager it’s subjectively graded and that portable test scores hadn’t caught on. That is, the reputation of the teacher was the measure of a minimum viable student. The census was barely automatically calculated at that time.
On the other hand, you probably spent a lot of your history lessons on World Wars 1, 2, and what’s has happened since, which is obviously not covered here. It’s not that we didn’t learn things, it’s that we learned different things. I don’t think it a a given that what they learned was better.
This is the big question. The blog says "hey, we don't teach memorization, we teach critical thinking".
My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"
Who's right? Are memorization and critical thinking complements, or substitutes?
This might have different answers in different fields. Like in maths, can you learn more advanced maths without a deep intuitive familiarity with numbers, the kind you get from being able to do arithmetic in your head? What about history? Can you get by without dates?
> My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"
Not true IMHO. You can map it to a some sort of neighbouring countries graph and a few other facts.
You don't need to point at them from memory for critical thinking. You need to know how to find them and look up more details. Whether you could point them out from memory is irrelevant. (Just makes the process faster)
So the opposite of irrelevant. You need 10 minutes before you can start to think about the question that was likely a premise for a larger argument.
"To be a surgeon, knowing surgery techniques from memory is irrelevant. When called upon to do surgery, I can simply leave, attend medical school, then come back and do the surgery. What's really important is knowing where the medical school is located."
The ability of critical thinking in abstract is different than a combination knowledge/physical skill which requires practice and is time sensitive. Your example is of an entirely different class than the concept of "critical thinking".
The claim was "you need memorization as a starting point". And that's the part I disagree with. Ability - it's irrelevant. Speed of doing it in specific cases - relevant.
Yeah, I know a bunch more of my times table from memory today than I did when I was tested on it forty years ago. But I passed all those tests because of course all you need is know that multiplication is repeated addition and do the addition fast.
Today I can tell you that 7 x 7 = 49 but back then I'd have just gone 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 quickly and said "49" for the same answer but a slight delay.
Parents who were taught times tables and didn't do much later mathematics are often confused by the way we teach kids today, because they expect we'd try to cram the tables in there, but that's not actually useful, what's useful is seeing the pattern and we'd prefer a child who maybe doesn't know off by heart what 9x8 is but sees the pattern, and whose first question when the teacher finally explains exponentiation and shows how it relates to multiplication, is, "Does this keep going forever?" which yes, it does, there are more hyperoperations and they do keep going like this forever. That child understood the pattern, 9x8 is a problem a calculator can solve, understanding the pattern is something else.
Why do you need to memorize the map when you have a map? Filling in the US states on a map is busy work, but reasoning why the locations of the states relative to each other by looking at a map is important.
Dates are only important as they relate to each other, their specifics are almost always meaningless.
There's a difference between rote memorization and committing to memory through practice.
I mean, there is still some rote memorization needed at times, but you want to minimize it as much as possible.
Memorization is rather important in an era where a big chunk of the population was farm workers in rural communities and access to information meant taking the time for a trip to the local library with a very limited selection of books.
This test doesn’t test whether you “understand biology.” Come on… seriously?
The mathematics is simple. The rest of it is stuff that is simple to Google. There’s a little bit of interpretation, but none of this is about problem solving or any kind of serious analysis.
> The mathematics is simple. The rest of it is stuff that is simple to Google.
Perhaps I am out of the loop, but are kids allowed to Google stuff during tests nowadays? In my days we were not allowed to bring any books or notes to a test, and up until the last two years of high school no calculators either.
All this besides the obvious that Google wasn't available back then. I guess many schools didn't even have a comprehensive library, let alone enough copies of a particular book to have many kids borrow them at the same time.
That's not the point. My point is that memorization is not education. Calling any mere information retrieval task education cheapens the entire idea of having a mind and doing important things with it.
Perhaps ironically, the ability to appreciate this point is not something you can achieve with Google (or by looking it up in a book). You have to think about the meaning of your experience of using your mind as you have gone through your life.
At one time I memorized 1132 digits of pi. There was no point to doing this other than to experience the process of memorization and recall, itself, in a relatively pure form. I've lost most of those digits now. But the insight I gained-- which is not about retrieval but about a way of seeing and interpreting the world, stayed with me.
THAT is education: the mind I've created and my process of creating it.
I think grandparent is claiming "you can just google it" in the same vein of "Just use a calculator!".
Funnily enough we're always carrying a calculator and (access to) Google in our pockets. Not that I share his view, I do think knowing facts and figures is necessary.
I see. Interestingly, in my country smart devices have been banned from schools for more than a year now. I'm pretty sure that besides keeping students away from distracting social media during class, not being able to just Google stuff will also force them to put more effort in learning about facts and figures.
> The rest of it is stuff that is simple to Google.
Have you ever seen anyone under the age of 30 try to "google" something? It's bizarre and disturbing. I've seen it for myself, but on r/teachers they have horror stories. To hear them tell it, most kids fail not by cheating, but by being unable to google anything with which to cheat. Even if we dial it down to balance the exaggeration...
Inability to search with more than one keyword. Inability to decide which words are unimportant in a sentence to leave them out of the search terms. Inability to add extra words to give the search engine enough context (funny story about a high school chemistry teacher telling them "reaction" doesn't work for that unless they also include "chemistry" or "chemical"). And on and on and on.
Problem solving is mathematics and physics, the rest is memorization, why not, most problems are solved with knowledge, not thinking, and schools don't teach proper problem solving as it needs a philosophy course.
> While it might be easy to romanticize the rigor of early 20th-century education based on this exam, it's important to recognize that the educational system of 1912 served a very different purpose compared to today’s system. The 1912 exam prioritized foundational, concrete knowledge, preparing students for the immediate demands of adult life in a largely localized, labor-intensive world. In contrast, the 2024 education system aims to equip students with the skills needed for a global, ever-changing job market, emphasizing critical thinking, creativity, and technological literacy.
I'd much prefer my children to have concrete knowledge and prepared for the world. Frankly, they'll be plenty prepared for the job market. Many of the folks I work are barely able to function outside of their role at work -- order all their food, can't change a tire, outsource all knowledge, etc. They're probably like the aristocrats in the 17th - 19th centuries, where they know only what they need, servants take care of the rest.
This is an 8th grade exam from 1912 from Bullitt County in Kentucky for White students.
It's not representative of the average American during that era - who would not have made it to 8th grade.
Heck, in 1910, Kentucky had a 17% illiteracy rate [0]
The fact that illiteracy using the IMF definition is non-existent in the US automatically means your average 8th grader today is better off than one a century ago.
And if I'm honest, the exam itself doesn't seem that different from content I dealt with in 4th-6th grade and I was attending an urban lower middle class school back then.
Practically all American adults are "literate" in the sense that they can recognise and write some words, but about 14% can't really read in any useful sense - they can usually understand a warning sign or recognise a brand name, but they couldn't reliably understand a one-paragraph newspaper article or find a program in a TV listing.
I'd steer clear from comparing countries based on Functional Illiteracy because the US is the only country that officially uses that definition and consistently collects data about this - which is good, because it is a forcing function for us to worker harder at solving functional illiteracy as well.
That said, Germany's functional illiteracy rate is estimated to be comparable to the US [0]
It's a similar story with PISA as well - most other countries use it as a dick measuring contest by testing at gifted schools, but the NCES tries to randomize PISA testing in order to actually benchmark subnational performance and identify laggards.
That’s shockingly high.
As somebody that has been literate for decades, I can’t even fathom how you would survive. Or if that’s taken care of, how would you entertain yourself?
I'd imagine it's much easier today, than it was in the past. We have TikTok and other forms of simple to access entertainment, no heavy reliance on cash and writing checks, and worse case you just ask someone else to help you.
Although I assume illiteracy indirectly implies that you can speak the language in some acceptable form, I would imagine it would be similar to living in another country without knowing the language. You go into the McDonald's click on the pictures of the food you want, press the big green button, then use your plastic card.
And note that very few counties in the US have a score above 276, which is the top of the range described as "Respondents can paraphrase or make low-level inferences."
Yeah, that’s not really what comes to mind for me when I hear about “literacy”. The standards they use to measure literacy aren’t just about being able to read words, but being able to reason with the information. I’m curious is they can reason about the information if it comes up in a spoken format, otherwise it sounds more like a general cognitive impairment and not something specific to written words
Americans suffer from the fact that most of them were taught to read using the whole language method, which has no scientific basis and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be ineffective.
To be honest, this is already a very charitable interpretation of the 1912 exam in the first place. If you strip out the questions of the arithmetic section, the remaining questions don't look like a test of "foundational, concrete knowledge" but rather a test of trivia the school board expects you to know. The grammar questions don't ask you how the English language works, they ask you how to mechanically parse a high register subset of the English language (i.e., avoiding colloquialisms) in a very particular jargon. The history section is even worse, treating wars as sequences of Important Battles™ and otherwise seeming to suggest a Great Man view of history.
You think asking for the location of organs is being prepared for work? Or geography, or history, or civil government. I think you're romanticizing the past.
I'm pretty sure I was tested on at least 80% of this as an eighth grader or thereabouts. To the extent that modern children may not be it likely reflects different priorities in education. To the extent that I could not answer some of it without Google 20 years later much of the relevant knowledge of not contained in rote memorization.
What was a passing grade back then? Even today this varies a lot in different systems. In the US public school system, 70% is considered passing, but in other contexts tests are constructed so that e.g. 35% correct is a passing grade.
GenX here. 70% was minimum acceptable grade when I was in US public school and when I was in College. You could technically pass a class in public school with 60% (D-). However you needed a C GPA to graduate high school in my day.
In college anything below a C put you on academic probation. In graduate school anything lower than a B put you on academic probation.
At university there were classes where anything less than 80% was considered a fail and there were other classes where anything more than 35% was considered astonishingly good. It really depends on the lecturer and their style.
For my college math and physics exams, the profs would pick exercises at random and wouldnt know how hard the test was until after the grades came in. And having a super high ceiling where a 25% is passing allowed them to see if there were any super geniuses in the class
I don’t see the point of an exam where a 25% is a passing grade. Sounds like bad teaching to me.
For most classes: say E&M or classical mechanics there are a finite number of problems that you can work out in a 3 hour exam. So you can study accordingly.
For harder classes, we usually had take home exams. The take home exams were extremely demanding but doable. There was no way you could pass in class or take home exams with a 25% grade.
30% was the lowest passing grade I've ever seen, and it was "Production Engineering" where we mostly had to learn a 650-page script and spill it out during the exam, with questions such as "A 25mm thick [precise alloy type] metal plate is bored with a [drill type] drill with a speed of xxxx rpm. Describe the size and shape of the shavings.". Very stupid, 6h long exam.
It's not worded super clearly, but they mean that the rope is being tied diagonally from the top of the building to a point 30 feet away from the building's base (horizontally). Like you, I initially interpreted the question to mean that the building was 30 feet above ground level, which left me a bit confused.
This all being said - I would expect an 8th grader of 2024 to pass the 1912 test. Look at the questions, they are nothing untoward, not rocket science.
Yeah, but the vast majority wouldn't, so isn't this contradictory? Is he trying to say 8th graders could pass if they studied or had the identical question in advance? That, too, I am skeptical of. Maybe some could, but most would not.
The reason is because the corpus of knowledge is so large. It's not like those are the only questions, but rather drawn from much larger reading. This is why even well-educated adults do poorly on general knowledge tests--what is considered 'general knowledge' is quite vast.
The difference now vs. 1912:
Emphasis on specialization for gifted kids, but also considerable intra-classroom variability of skill, so you have some kids learning multi-variable calc at 9th grade (not at school, but rather at local college, private tutoring , or self-study such as online with apps), and on the other extreme, others still struggling with fractions.
In 1912, the strugglers would have been weeded out by either dropping out of school or learning a trade. Mandatory k-12 school was not yet a thing. So there are selection biases here. Same for demographic change.
The only reason a modern 8th grader wouldn't pass is that most of these questions are about regurgitating memorized snippets of data, which has been out of style for quite a while. The math portion is a few grades less advanced than what I was learning in 8th grade a few decades ago.
I saw a quote the other day - "We used to teach Latin and Greek in High School, now we teach remedial English in College." - seems pretty much on point. Massachusetts, a state renowned for it's commitment to education, is voting next month to eliminate it's High School exit exam - which if passed would leave only 7 states with any form of statewide graduation requirement. Feels pretty regressive - the soft-bigotry of low expectations coming to the forefront.
It feels that these educational regressions are quite intentional and pave the way to a more authoritarian society.
It is hard to apply an agenda on an educated and internet-connected populace. Internet connectivity is still useful as a control/propaganda mechanism, as the available content can be centrally influenced (think RT News ban, "community guidelines" moderation, etc.). So it is chosen to gradually erode education over time using a variety of pretexts, so that the population will gradually regress from self-thinking citizens to obedient subjects.
Ontario schools haven’t had a formal exit exam for as long as I can remember. Final exams of individual classes was what defined your exit grade (usually 20-30%).
If you are referring to the exit exam in the link, you also have to remember that grade 8 in 1912 was available to a privileged few. This filtered out people with learning difficulties whose families didn’t feel like spending money on school was a worthwhile investment.
Those that had the means to attend school in the 1900s also had time to dedicate to study.
There used to be jobs that would hire without a high school diploma. Now it's harder and harder to find one that will take people without a college degree.
What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek?
It's not a direct analogy - it's a commentary on the expectations of students. Learning Latin was a fundamental part of a science or medical education, Greek was a fundamental part of what we would call a humanities education - they were the keys to communicating across boundaries in an era when English had not yet become the "global language". If anything this makes the fact that there are entire school districts in the US wherein not a single student can read to grade level even more troubling - how can someone possibly succeed at anything other than being a TikTok star without the ability clearly communicate?
Also, you are comparing expectations on top students in one case and expectations on overall population including the lowest ranking students. Likewise, reading at "grade level" is fairly high standard that massive amount of Kentucky 1912 kids would not clear ... because no one taught them to our current grade level standard.
Americans colleges teach biology, physics, chemistry to a pretty high level. Entrance to the top universities is also massively more competitive then it used to be.
That competition would seem to make it even more important that we are better educating students today - especially when they are not just competing against kids from Kentucky.
> What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek?
The answer depends on who you ask. It you ask this to what you probably would call 'capitalists' the answer would be "school choice, school vouchers, home schooling and more vocational schooling instead of useless college 'degrees' in lesbian dance theory and the like". Ask those who consider themselves to be the "defenders of the oppressed" and the answer would be "more money for teachers (unions), get rid of standardised tests because they are 'racist', get rid of those 'books written by dead white men' and replace them with books by 'diverse' authors, get rid of school choice, close top education schools because they attract mostly asian and white pupils, lower admission demands for 'diverse' people, cancel student debt, etc.".
I think the former approach is more likely to lead to a return to sanity while the latter will just lead to more dismal [1] results, what do you think?
[1] interestingly enough my phone autocorrected that word to 'Disney' which somehow seems fitting
The former are not capitalist response. They are the response of conservative right that has zero to do with capitalism and a lot to do with wish for social control and forced social hierarchy. Homeschooling movement project is and was all about forcing ideological and religious conformity.
>What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek?
Let them become homeless and addicted to fentanyl and slowly wither away and die or have to resort to crime to survive then lock them up and tax the people who are good at Latin and Greek to pay for their upkeep or UBI so they don't get robbed or murdered on the street by the people who aren't good at Latin or Greek and have nothing left to loose.
The Balkans of 112 years ago did not look like the Balkans of today (for starters, Serbia no longer borders Turkey), and countries' spelling changes over time. For example, Turkey now desires that English-speaking people use Türkiye instead.
But maybe it's too much to ask of modern Americans to understand that spellings of proper nouns can and do change over time.
Thank you for finding the truth. Books from that era would likely have been subjected to far more careful proofreading, which explains the typo density (or lack thereof) compared to this.
“Decline I” is an instruction for the student to provide the first person pronoun in all cases: I (nominative), me (accusative/dative/ablative), my (genitive), mine (genitive substantive). (I have borrowed the case names from Latin, with which I am more familiar. I think the English cases are nominative, objective, possessive.)
I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.
> Note that there are several typesetting mistakes on the test including a mistake in the spelling list. The word "eneeavor" should be "endeavor." This version of the exam was probably a master version given out to the schools (note that the spelling words wouldn’t be written on a test.) The museum has been told that the exam was handed out in a scroll form (that is why the paper is long.) The typos would have been corrected simply by contacting the teachers and telling them to mark their copies accordingly, much like would be done today. And there might not be quite as many typos as you think; "Serbia" for example was indeed spelled "Servia" back then.
Could also be "Decline one", in any case, not a typo. "I" can be declined as subjective I, objective me, reflexive myself, possessive my, independent possessive mine.
It's true that LLMs are very good at reproducing correctly spelled text - but we're looking at an image here, and image-generating AIs aren't so good at generating text in most cases. They've gotten a lot better recently, but they're still not quite there yet.
(To be clear, I don't believe this is actually generated by AI, but in this case, but since we're looking at an image, I can see why some people might be concerned that it might be AI given the misspellings.)
