Could you pass this 8th grade test from 1912?
onepercentrule.substack.com
onepercentrule.substack.com
10% of high school aged people attended a high school?
90% of students enrolled in high school never bothered to attend or "worked from home"?
Wouldn't that make them factory workers rather than students though?
According to the top comment, only about 10% of students attended high school at the time.
It would be interesting to know what was the “right” answer to this in 1912.
An indian-australian's semi-recent take on modern "educayshun":
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.
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.
School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
They would lack any info about world wars, decolonization, computers, space race, internet, climate change, just to pick some topics taught today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia for images:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Raleigh
Sketch one balding clean shaven face and sketch another one with pointy triangular beard?
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.
Deep knowledge wasn't required.
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?
Not true IMHO. You can map it to a some sort of neighbouring countries graph and a few other facts.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So memorisation was necessity.
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.
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.
[0] - https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1910/Vol1...
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.
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."
Well that question didn’t age well…
In college anything below a C put you on academic probation. In graduate school anything lower than a B put you on academic probation.
A memorable classes being Electromagnetism 4 where the passing grade in my year was 8% and Quantum Mechanics 3 with 15%.
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.
Passing grade, 2, in most schools would be from around 30% to 50%. It's teacher choice.
Using Pythagoras, it's the square root of 30*2 + 40*2. It effectively a 3, 4, 5 right angle triangle.
A2 + b2 = c2
And this is pre-calculator so the number is one of the squares that the kids would have memorized. 4^2 + 3^2 = 25 = 50 feet.
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.
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.
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.
What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek?
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.
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
And the latter one are to large extend strawman.
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.
I can't even read it on my small phone screen and I'll be d*mned if I have to zoom in
But maybe it's too much to ask of modern Americans to understand that spellings of proper nouns can and do change over time.
Remember that big hot war in the 90s?
And there was that thing in the 40s, too . . .
Ah, when the Servians shot down the invisible airplane, because they didn't see it. I remember :-)
Is this AI-generated? It certainly has all the signs of being so.
I've read real books from the late 19th and early 20th century, and while occasional typos do appear, their density here is suspicious.
Thus my conclusion is that I don't think this is a real 8th grade test.
https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191... - on the answers page they also acknowledge the typo on "eneeavor".
https://headsup.scoutlife.org/would-you-pass-this-test/ - 2013
I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.
"Decline I" is a request to decline the pronoun "I".
Edit: there's also "secrate" and "Pres dent"
edit: The test seems to come from this page from the county's museum: https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191.... The WayBack machine records the first snapshot in 2012, so AI seems unlikely.
They note the spelling errors
> 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.
Current generation LLMs does not make smelling mistakes, only humans do.
Even the best of existing image generation models often spell words hilariously wrong when asked to generate an image containing text.
But sometimes their messassage gets mangled in intersting ways
(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.)
But yes in general it's a reasonable concern to have.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/fcell...