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.

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.