So far we’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. Today we’re looking at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that represented the body of knowledge a typical 8th grader was supposed to have learned.
At left is an 8th grade final exam from 1895 from a school in Salina, Kansas*. It made the rounds on social media a few years ago, usually as an illustration of how educational standards have slipped. If people today couldn’t pass an 8th grade exit exam from 1895, then our current school system must be the absolute pits. That’s nonsense, of course, and I’ll explain why in a minute. What I see when I look at this exam is clear evidence of how students were taught from 1635 to about 1900 — through memorization and recitation. I can also see clear evidence of how limited some subjects were compared to today. Let’s break this down a bit.
First, notice that virtually all the questions require the student to recount memorized information — 9 rules for the use of capital letters, all the parts of speech, definitions for verse, stanza, and paragraph, the epochs of U.S. history, 3 prominent battles of the Rebellion (Civil War), events that happened on specific dates, the uses of rivers, a description of the water cycle. Most of the exam is what the student can remember across these content areas; it is fundamentally a test of their memory, not their understanding. Even the 150-word composition (roughly one short paragraph of writing) at the end of the Grammar section is just for the student to explain the practical uses for the rules of grammar, something they could have easily memorized. This is true of every question requiring writing on the exam. It is an impressive display of memorization skills but doesn’t demonstrate much application of that knowledge except in one or two areas.
Second, notice how limited (and even incorrect) some content areas are. History goes from Columbus discovering America (he didn’t) to the end of the Civil War. Language arts is confined to grammar — no mention of literature at all. Geography is essentially climate, landforms, trade centers, and the ability to name republics and capitals or to describe (define) some specific locations like Denver, Monrovia, and Hecla.** Some subjects we just don’t learn anymore, like Orthography (orthography still plays a part in literacy, but not the way it appears here). From the test questions, this looks like a combination of phonics, pronunciation, and spelling, with a few homophones thrown in. Orthography as an area of study is curious — the emphasis on pronunciation makes me wonder if this was specifically to address immigrant speech patterns and accents.
Third, notice that math and orthography are the only content areas that require any application of skills. Orthography requires student to mark some words with diacritical marks and syllables and use homophones correctly in sentences. Math actually has students calculating interest and applying other operations, including finding volume. Quite a lot of content would be foreign to a modern audience: questions 2 and 3 under math require knowledge that the vast majority of students today wouldn’t have because we’ve moved away from a mostly agrarian population. Knowing the cubic feet or specific weight of a bushel is no longer common knowledge; neither is the rod as a unit of measurement in question 9. And few of us write our own receipts, promissory notes, or even checks anymore, as required by question 10.*** Notice, too, that some questions seem difficult at first blush but a little digging reveals they aren’t that challenging. For example, “Name all the republics and Europe and give the capital of each” seems like a heavy lift until you realize that Europe only had two republics in 1895 — Switzerland and France. Other parts, like identifying all the events connected to a set of dates, remind me a bit of the AP U.S. History exam — kids also have to memorize a lot of dates — except that the students here don’t have to analyze anything or support it with evidence.
Notice that there’s little we could call science here. No mention of cell science or the various body systems and their functions, nothing about food webs or how energy cycles through biomes or the principal of energy loss as energy is consumed up the food chain, no animal classification, no basic chemistry in the form of mixtures and solutions, no basic understanding of forces, waves, or circuits. There’s also no algebraic reasoning –what we might call pre-algebra — which is now woven throughout math instruction beginning in at least grade 2. By the end of 8th grade today, students have studied historical events and epochs beginning with the Stone Age and studied them across cultures — Egypt, Greece, Rome, European exploration, and so on. They have also studied major religious systems — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so on. They don’t study geography as intensively, but that might be because virtually everyone has the ability to look up geographical information as needed. So perhaps the more pertinent question is not whether we could pass this exam, but could an 8th grader from 1895 pass a test covering the content a typical 8th grader today would be expected to know?
Not a chance.
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*I checked with Snopes.com and it does appear to be a genuine exam from 1895.
**I had to look these up. Hecla (Hekla) is a volcano in Iceland. Monrovia was the capital of Liberia, the first republic in Africa. The geography section is very concerned with republics.
***Geography also has some content that was highly contextualized to the time period. Hecla, to take one example, was a volcano in Iceland, but a Google search will tell you it’s also an island and fishing community in Winnipeg, Canada. You could be excused for thinking that that’s what Hecla referred to (this is a spelling issue — the volcano is actually spelled ‘Hekla’ while the island in Canada is ‘Hecla’; American texts mostly ignored native spellings). However, it becomes clear that it refers to the volcano when you realize that Hekla had a major eruption in 1845-46 that lasted 6 months and impacted a lot of northern Europe. It would have dominated news headlines for a long time and was therefore significant enough to merit inclusion on this exam 50 years later.