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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

>Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940

Absolute hogwash. In my parents day (in the 60s) high school included mastery of at least one foreign language and one dead language. Mom and dad read Beowulf in high school, in Anglo Saxon; something modern English majors don't do. And my parents were working class people at working class schools in a factory town. Moving the goalposts to allow morons to get a high school diploma isn't improving educational attainment. Hell, I could point out a dozen examples of decline in Bachelors degrees in my lifetime.

This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

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Except the number of people who received that education was much smaller than the number of people who go to average-quality schools today.

Here in Brazil people complain about the public schools of today, saying that 50 years ago it was great, there was latin, and french, and this and that. They all forget that the public schools from the 1960's were for the middle and upper classes (here in Brzil). The poor either had a couple of years of some very basic education, or just went to work and had none at all.

That is the main problem.

We don't have Elites or high class anymore.*

We only have "averages".

* Talking about education not economical status

> This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school

And thank goodness we've moved past such facile exams. Few of those questions test any sort of understanding, comprehension, or synthesis -- the hallmarks of the so-called "deep reading" lionized in the above-linked article.

There's no call to analyze a logical argument or to make a persuasive argument of one's own. The vast majority of questions amount to memorization and recall. The only thing truly tested here is whether the applicant was of the proper social class to have had the privilege of a preparatory school or private tutoring.

No dude; that's what they used to teach in High School. Shitty high schools. Vastly more than your average Ph.D. in classics in current year ever achieves; you can have a great laugh trolling modern classics profs in the US with latin limericks they can't possibly understand. Let alone the algebra parts.

I snork at the rest. The present Harvard entrance exam is a great test for social signalling that you're stinking rich. Not many actual high school students actually form a non profit and get 1600 SAT or whatever; unless mom and dad are loaded and did it for them.

How many people attended high school back in those days? Did people in every country have the same opportunities in terms of education? Remember that when people say education standards are improving, they are not talking about a particular country, but rather about an overall global measurement. I’m sure countries in the global south (where the majority of the world’s population lives) were not having those same education opportunities back in the 60s. But now they have widespread access to education.

Also, how useful it is/was reading in Anglo Saxon? And please, could you point out all those examples and arguments with verifiable evidence, rather than anecdotal ones?

Everyone went to HS in my parents day; you can look up the graduation rate in the US; it was lower than it is now ~70%.

Reading Anglo Saxon is "useful" if you wish to understand the english language, and appreciate the high literature available in Old English. Sort of like reading Shakespeare or Camoes is useful in appreciating what the human race has done and what can be done with older versions of the language. If you're a cretinous boob, I guess learning handwriting, grammar and so on are also entirely optional. We can just teach kids how to thumb twiddle their phones, take birth control and twerk their asses.

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