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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

If I remember correctly I was tested on stuff that is just as hard or harder at the end of 8th grade. Maybe with less rote memorization and more thinking, more opportunity to demonstrate that I actually understood everything [0].

Consider also that they talked about all those things prior to the exam. Could you pass it right now? Maybe not. Could you pass it after a few weeks learning about the material? With flying colors.

It’s interesting to read the questions but certainly not at all indicative of any developments in the educational system. You need statistics and creative social scientists to find out something about that.

[0] I personally don’t like rote memorization. I recognize that rote memorization can sometimes be useful – I don’t need a calculator for simple multiplications – but I would much rather just understand something and develop from that understanding a clear picture of which facts are important enough to memorize.

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Right, but this is basic, practical stuff for everyday life (except for the stuff about bushels and rods). Even though you can learn it and then pass, the fact that you are past 8th grade and cannot means your education is deficient (mine as well).

Rote memorization is underrated. Yes, memorization alone is useless, but critical thinking without anything to think about is also useless.

So you can still pass all your tests you wrote in school? I certainly can’t and I don’t consider my education deficient because of that. To say nothing of the fact that those questions are more than a century out of date.

I also think you are misunderstanding the point I’m making about rote memorization. What good does it if you can merely name and define all the parts of speech? You can learn that whole list and all the right definitions without ever understanding anything. You can answer that question in the test completely without knowing anything of worth. There are better ways of testing whether you know what the parts of speech are and whether you can identify them.

If you read the questions you'd see they are a combination of both memorization and understanding. You can't have understanding without memorization.

"Even though you can learn it and then pass, the fact that you are past 8th grade and cannot means your education is deficient (mine as well)."

No, it means that people forget things that they don't use.

This test is testing specific content knowledge. Learning content doesn't matter. The content of your job or whatever changes depending on what you're doing. Like other people have said, if you were being taught these topics for the term leading up to the test, it's an easy test - there's no thinking involved, just memory.

What matters is the PROCESS of learning, and in that respect, I think the modern methods of education are far better than straight ROTE learning. (Though not optimal by any means)

Disagree completely. I could only answer one or maybe two of the grammar questions and yet I speak and write English just fine. Honestly, I don't even know what the "Principle Parts" of a verb refer to and I certainly can't list them. What bearing does that have on anything?

It's always nice to be able to take a machine apart, see how it works, and put it back together successfully. Language is a tool used every day by everyone, but fewer and fewer people know how it actually works. I wish schools still taught grammar properly. I hardly learned anything about how English (or language in general) worked until I took a foreign language course in high school.

Some aspects of grammar are important, but it's important to reflect on the purpose of its study: The ability to construct a sentence that's cogent, clear and understandable both in writing and while speaking.

Some things are simply not important to know as a native speaker but still manage to get taught in English classes. A couple of examples:

1. The different between "that" and "which" (e.g. The curtains that/which cover the windows). Either way is perfectly clear and rigid adherence to a correct "rule" is just language fascism.

2. Terminology for many things that are specific to grammar are also pretty useless. Words like 'participle', 'split-infinitive', and 'gerund' (I literally had to look that up to remember it) are basically useless. Specifically from the test are phrases which obviously have been taught within the class, but don't have any real meaning outside of the concept it's teaching: "Parts of Speech" and "Define Case".

Grammar is only important insomuch as you can write and speak intelligently and coherently. Construction beyond that belongs in a linguistics class specifically focused on the mechanics of language.

Good communication is crucial to pretty much everything in life.

Additionally, grammar is not merely a matter of formulating sentences properly. Learning grammar structures your thought and allows you to make precise distinctions, important for sophisticated thinking.

Times tables are useful to have memorized. Memorizing random world rivers and semi-major cities, not so much.

Right, I definitely feel bad to have forgotten Aspinwall, if ever I knew where it was. Yet I doubt that anyone worth reading has used the word "fane" since about Alfred Lord Tennyson--I won't feign shame for missing that one.

I bet a fair number of HN readers (the Americans anyway), could pass Grammar, History, and Geography. So remind me what critical thinking Orthography feeds.

Actually, rote memorization is overrated, it's not a natural way for humans to remember information. The brain is much better at remembering locations and events, rather than lists of items, I've posted this before, but if you've not seen it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

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