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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with these types of posts is that they never come with the context or the gravitas needed to substantiate the underlying claims that are implied by the presentation.

Were all eighth grade exams of similar difficulty? Did most children pass? Did the children that passed truly understand the underlying concepts?

Don't get me wrong; I don't think that things are honky dory right now. I have serious problems with our education system, but I don't buy for a second that kids 100 years ago were so advanced.

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>The problem with these types of posts is that they never come with the context or the gravitas needed to substantiate the underlying claims that are implied by the presentation.

I don't actually see any of that in this post, though I can't speak to the original headline here on HN.

I think your expectations tinted how you interpreted the framing. The test is presented as a historical document, and I didn't see any attempt at commentary on the current educational system.

Bullshit. The reason this document is at the top of hacker news is BECAUSE of the implications.

And? If you'd directed your dismissal at HN readers, that would be one thing, but you didn't! There was no "underlying claim" evident in the linked article itself.

Putting this in context, I'm sure the gross overall level of education for teenagers in the early 20th century was higher than it is now.

Education was far less prevalent for minority groups, who, as an unfortunate side effect to class-wide limited incomes, don't have the same access to the kind of education which would give this sort of examination to an 8th grader.

Now, if you attend a private grammar school in a Westchester suburb you can expect a lot of your children will have exams like this...

How do you define 'level of education' on a per-student basis? (Well, I guess the whole issue is that that's hard a question to answer, right?)

I think, for instance, that the average eighth grader knows much more in 2013 than they did in 1912, but that the proportion of that knowledge that they gained from an education system is much smaller. Knowledge has become universally accessible; reasoning, less so.

I think you missed the "who were in schools at the 8th grade level" qualifier in your post.

I think you're wrong about the gross overall education of teenagers.

>Progressively fewer adults have limited their education to completion of the 8th grade which was typical in the early part of the century. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education.

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

Truly understand? Very doubtful. I expect they only wrote those questions to impress future generations.

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