Probably not. Anyone who has seen the Ken Burns special on the civil war, providing they have at least one brain cell would have to be impressed with grandeur, and scope he detailed concerning the greatest tragedy to ever befall this nation.
While all of the documentary was impressive, the one thing that caught my attention the most was the absolutely beautiful, almost poetic letters wrote by the men from both sides of that ugly conflict, to their loved ones back home. And what made these letters even more impressive to me, was the fact that these were not letters just from officers, and others who would have been highly educated, but mostly from the enlisted men in the trenches. Just kids really straight from the farms and ranches and polluted cities of that time.
It was hard to believe that so long ago the writings and vocabularies, of these troops exceeded almost everything wrote today. Their ability to communicate such vivid and emotional experiences through words was amazing.
Well today I stumbled across something that explains why. I frequently comment on the poor quality of education today. I point out the dumbing down of lessons, so that they more closely match the dumbest of students. A multi-cult effort that makes all feel equal. I often compare today’s school system and the resulting near morons being turned out on the streets, the day they finish being pushed through the 12th grade, to what and how I was taught in school over 35 years ago. But after reading what I’m about to post I realize that even in my time the dumbing down process had already begun.
This is the eighth-grade final exam* from 1895 from Salina, Kansas. It was taken
from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, Kansas and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10.Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e’. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10.Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10.Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.
The top of the test states > “EXAMINATION GRADUATION QUESTIONS OF SALINE COUNTY, KANSAS
April 13, 1895 J.W.Armstrong, County Superintendent.Examinations at Salina, New Cambria, Gypsum City, Assaria, Falun, Bavaria, and District No. 74 (in Glendale Twp.)”
According to the Smoky Valley Genealogy Society, Salina, Kansas “this test is the original eighth-grade final exam for 1895 from Salina, KS. An interesting note is the fact that the county students taking this test were allowed to take the test in the 7th grade, and if they did not pass the test at that time, they were allowed to re-take it again in the 8th grade.”
Reference here and here. This is a massive collection of articles on the condition of todays schools and the increasingly socialist Government.
Always the skeptic when no primary sources are provided, I checked out snopes.com about this. Amazingly, snopes doesn’t dispute the authenticity of the exam, only that the exam fails to prove that American education is in decline (which is a matter of opinion rather than fact; I always thought that snopes was a fact checking site). One argument made is that a student from 1895, having been recently drilled on the information required in the exam, will of course fare better than even adults of today.
Snopes also uses an argument I’ve often heard from my brother and sister-in-law (both educators) – that knowledge of the late 19th Century is simply irrelevant in the early 21st Century. Although it’s true that the subject matter of some of the questions is culturally specific to rural Kansas in the 1890’s (bushels of wheat, acres of land, etc.), I would counter that its not the content of the knowledge, but rather the quality that’s being tested – what educators refer to as higher order thinking skills. (See this link to an overview of Bloom’s taxonomy.)
In my brief career as a substitute teacher, I found that a lot of high school students’ time was spent on finding words in the textbook and copying them into blank spaces on worksheets. When compared to the level of thinking required of their counterparts in the 1890’s, I think today’s students are really getting short changed.
Looking over the 1895 test, I only found two questions that most students in 2008 would feel comfortable answering. Here’s how I suspect many of them would respond:
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
Climate is something that has been changing for the worse, especially since Bush stole the election in 2000, leading to the inevitable death of the planet. Climate depends on the greed of Big Oil, huge multi-national corporations, overpaid CEOs, and war-mongering neocons like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and McBush (McCain).
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
The extremes of climate in Kansas (as well as everywhere else in the world) are due to rich, racist, sexist, homophobic Republicans driving SUVs and not caring about polar bears.
To 1&2 ROTFLMAO. So very true. You should have added gun toting, bible thumpers to the last
As far as Snopes goes I too, am beginning to see that in situations that support conservative philosophy, they seem to always find a way to make the left look right also. Fact check .org does the same thing. In Fact I will post later about this e-mail going around in several different forms that mentions McCain and the long history of military service to our country of both his ancestors, himself and his sons. At he same time it links Obama to Islam. The sites admit the parts about McCain are true but deny the part about Obama or just leave that part out altogether. I’ll have that up later.
I agreed with you