Could you pass the 8th grade test in 1895?

Good find Banshee.......:upretty much what I was trying to say.

What nearly all these pundits fail to grasp is "I can't answer these questions" is not the same thing as "These questions demonstrate that students in earlier days were better educated than today's students." Just about any test looks difficult to those who haven't recently been steeped in the material it covers. If a 40-year-old can't score as well on a geography test as a high school student who just spent several weeks memorizing the names of all the rivers in South America in preparation for an exam, that doesn't mean the 40-year-old's education was woefully deficient -- it means the he simply didn't retain information for which he had no use, no matter how thoroughly it was drilled into his brain through rote memory some twenty-odd years earlier. I suspect I'd fail a lot of the tests I took back in high school if I had to re-take them today without reviewing the material beforehand. I certainly wouldn't be able to pass any arithmetic test that required me to be familiar with such arcane measurements as "rods" and "bushels," but I can still calculate areas and volumes just fine, thank you.

an article showing the decline in the standards of the modern amerikan school system...

www.ldonline.org...

but hoax not withstanding....it still reminds us that most school children couldn't diagram a sentence to save their life...

I took Honors English 11 this year and we weren't taught anything relating to sentence structure. The hardest thing we did was analyze The Great Gatsby and determine what would have happened in the book if the main characters were of a different race than they were written to be. Somehow it has become the responsibility of the Ohio public school system to teach political correctness...