Sorry. This is an urban legend. Please see http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp for the background of this hoary chestnut.
GMTA
Not a very comprehensive Snopes article. It doesn’t explain how the fake originally arose, which makes me wonder if it is true after all. In any case, the dumbing down of education has been quantified. Test scores have been in decline, which is usually attributed to a greater “democratization” of the tests. But the absolute number of people scoring over a 600 on the verbal SAT declined by 64% in the 1970’s and 1980’s. See for example, “The Schools We Need, and Why We Don’t Have Them” by E.D. Hirsch.
Did you read the article you link to? It is NOT an urban legend. It's an actual test from 1895, whether it was a High School exam or an 8th grade test is not known. Snope's doesn't make any effort to debunk the test...only it's significance as a tool to measure modern academic progress.
And FWIW, Snopes is not the be all and end all of internet research.! Who the hell died and made them the Gaurdians of Truth?
Ahh, but Snopes doesn’t say the test isn’t real, they discount the need for the reader to pass it.
Ouch.
Thanks for the snopes link.
But this isn’t without irony. They give an example of a teaching exam which is terribly difficult from the 1800s.
So I guess the thread is salvaged. :-)
I read the explanation on Snopes and DID NOT see where they said that the exam itself was a false urban legend. What they did say is that kids could probably learn the same thing today IF it was taught and then they mentioned that certain things that we would consider important today are not addressed.
The Snopes article does not debunk it. It in fact assumes it is true, and reinforces it is true by referencing a similar test for teachers. The Snopes article apparently attempts to argue the argument that the test invites.
The Scopes article didn’t say the test is bogus as an example of a 1895 school test. They pointed out that:
1) Most any 40-yr old today would have trouble taking their old HS tests because they were not recently studying and learning the facts, figures and techniques upon which the tests are based on.
2) There are significant differences in what a student was required to learn in 1895 rather than in 2008. Such as learning to function or excel in an agrarian society where little knowledge of foreign affairs was necessary for the avarage person VS needing to learn about the entire world to be sucessful in today’s TV/computer/internet driven society.
Actually, they do not say that at all. They do not deny the authenticity of the test. They just say, "Big deal. It doesn't matter." It really brings the whole Snopes thing down significantly to my mind.
ML/NJ
Perhaps Snopes is an urban legend ;-) I have no idea of the provenance of this particular test, but I can tell you that if it isn’t authentic it more or less accurately represents what was expected by schools in the 19th Century. In fact, the math is a little too easy, believe it or not.
If Snopes cared about accuracy in any serious sense, they would have looked at the standard textbooks of that period - the 1836 McGuffey’s Readers, Ray’s Arithmetics, and Harvey’s Grammars - to see what the standards actually were. If they had, they would have seen that children living in what we would consider dire poverty today were learning at an amazing level with very little being spent on “education”. BTW, I have used some of these textbooks with my children.
The primary urban legend regarding education today is that government schools provide one....You won’t find that on the left leaning Snopes site.
While this example has been debunked, the gist of its message is true. I happened to be in the Winchester, MA town hall some years ago. They had posted in one of their display cases an example of a test given to high school seniors, circa 1900. It was not significantly different from the fictional example here.
Snopes doesn't actually say the test is a hoax, just that kids these days don't learn that specific stuff (probably spend their time on gobal warming and black history instead)