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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much the actual average level of education has changed, though the topics may be different. Could those 4th-grade dropouts read and understand a newspaper, calculate how many pounds of barley it takes to plant the south field now that we cleared that new area, and work out a 1-in-10 slope for the new shed roof? I bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.

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Take a look at this entrance exam to Harvard from 1869: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvarde...

Good luck finding high school students today who could get a good score on this test.

There's vastly more emphasis on classical knowledge: Greek, Latin, ancient history, mathematical proofs...

The examination reflects the curriculum, and the preparatory schools taught to the examination.

Henry Adams on the Harvard of his day (he entered in 1854):

"disappointment apart, Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile. The graduate had few strong prejudices. He knew little, but his mind remained supple, ready to receive knowledge."

"In the one branch he most needed--mathematics--barring the few first scholars, failure was so nearly universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed lamentably. At best he could never have been a mathematician; at worst he would never have cared to be one; but he needed to read mathematics, like any other universal language, and he never reached the alphabet."

But a) perhaps the mathematical curriculum had improved over the fifteen years between his entrance and that exam, and b) a large proportion of those who write about their schooling speak so poorly of it that one ends by suspecting exaggeration.

[Edit: in the spirit of "show your work": https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044-images.html]

I can't even figure out what some of these are asking.

Question 5 of the History and Geography section is just "Leonidas, Pausanias, Lysander."

Am I supposed to write about what they have in common? Who they each were? When and where they ruled? Other questions seem to include some form of instruction while being equally short ("Compare Athens with Sparta") but that one and a couple others are just a topic with seemingly no direction at all.

Heh, obvious a cultured man of knowledge (or anyone who watched the movie 300 and read wikipedia) would know that these are major leaders of Sparta

Grant, Sherman, Meade

Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle

It's to filter the cultured elite from the unread plebes.

I would expect most Harvard-bound high school seniors to be able to breeze through the math section. Geometry was a ninth grade subject for me so I probably would have forgotten some bits if I took this unprepared as a senior, but it wouldn't have taken much studying ro refresh on that. There may be some trick question I'm not noticing, but the Latin section seems extremely simple. Ancient Greek has certainly vanished from HS curriculums, but if Harvard was testing on it two years of Latin and two years of Greek would suffice to pass those sections.

I think overall a Harvard-bound student today would do better on this test than a Harvard student from 1869 would do on the SAT, but I'm not sure if that even means anything.

That's an amazing test, if what you want to evaluate is the candidate's immersion in the wellspring of Western culture (and some math). I'm struck by how little fluency the Greek test requires, though: it looks to me (with my "small Latine and lesse Greeke") like it's mostly grammar work, since the difficult words are all supplied.

I would have loved living among people whose elites valued Western culture so highly.

You still can. You just need to play online matches of Rome Total War, which is where I learned the vast majority of my classical historical knowledge, lol

If Greek or Latin we're still requirements for Harvard high school students would become fluent.

They sure would enjoy the salutatory speeches delivered at commencement: https://youtu.be/LYewkFKPPhs?si=egbRqSO2lMVxIMzz

> a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs

When most people lived on farms (up until the 1950s), there was less need to be good factory workers. But there were more factories offering more employment in America, so the stats say you are correct.

https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...

And pretty much all those jobs you're talking about are gone or low paying. Farmers aren't calculating how many pounds of barley per acre they need. They are operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them because someone thousands of miles away wrote magicial electric symbols in sand. The world is a vastly more complicated place now.

Wow.

Someone doesn't spend time in rural areas.

Where I live it's almost all third generation "family farms", those that are still here after others have left.

The farms are bigger but they're still at core family farms and businesses with capital costs in the millions to tens of millions, run and worked by people that farm and almost all whom have other jobs and|or businesses in parallel.

One typical neighbour is planting out several hundred acres, has a side supply business with the grain coop to site several five story concrete grain silos, owns and runs four or five local school buses (and employs drivers) with a partnership in a bee hive placement business (for honey but mainly for pollination in the district).

Between them they all have a basic grasp of (with different members specialising) building, radio equipment, GPS equipment and data managment, double entry bookkeeping and employee paperwork for a million+ per annum turn over, mechanics for cars, tractors, bob cats, etc, agonomy, animal health, first aid, welding, carpentry, . . .

Hmm, while I think of it the same family has the local volunteer fire chief (another part time job) who handles bush fire preparedness in the area, fire breaks etc.

There's no reliance on "magical someones" thousands of miles away - those services are used, sure - but they're not counted on to be always available or there when needed - farming would just grind to halt with that level of unquestioning dependance.

>Someone doesn't spend time in rural areas.

Pretty poor assumption being that I come from a family of midwestern farmers that have been integrating high technology into their operations for decades.

>There's no reliance on "magical someones" thousands of miles away

You just listed out a huge number of things before that where they do have said reliance. Those bobcats/cars/tractors are not made in their neighborhood. Instead there is a vast network that supplies these objects to them at a national and worldwide level. If the fertilizer doesn't show up in spring, yields plummet. If the fuel trucks supplying petro stop farming in the mid-west stops. We aren't running steam engines that can be fed off of locally sourced wood (ok, maybe the Amish still are).

You live in a global economy that farming depends on. This entire rugged individualism works ok with short term problems, and falls apart as long term problems build up.

> operating computer controlled heavy equipment that does a huge amount of the calculations for them

They're also measuring soil nutrient and nitrogen content, integrating global price signals into their sourcing and supply chain, and paying attention to the genetic characteristics of their cultivars. I'd wager American farmers, today, are vastly more knowledgeable about their craft, at a fundamental level, than farmers in the 1930s.

> i bet most of them could, and that a lot of the time the average person spends in school now is not as well-directed toward their likely life needs — which may be less easily ascertained.

Interesting to order it this way because, as the engine of meritocracy, education is supposed to determine life direction, not be reflective of it. Of course this isn't how people actually think of it, but we don't live in a meritocracy either now do we

What did they receive for humanities though? School is and should be about you making a better more complete member of society, not just a better cog in the economy.

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