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. We looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders and we’ve looked at the abuses of the Indian Boarding School system. We went back again to look at the parallel-but-very-unequal development of Black schools in the U.S. between the Civil War and Brown v. Board. Today we are backing up once more to look at changes in education beginning to emerge in the early 20th century.
Here’s another 8th grade exam, this time from Bullitt County, Kentucky in 1912. This is 17 years later than the last exam we looked at from Kansas in 1895 and from the eastern U.S. rather than the Midwest. In just this short span, we can see some interesting changes but also some things that are essentially the same. We can also see very clearly how important context is to understanding why the test writers included what they did.
The test starts with spelling and includes some tricky words like bequeath, rhinoceros, and exaggerate. It also includes pennyweight, a word that we don’t use anymore because a pennyweight of something now is virtually nothing. In 1912, however, a pennyweight was a common measure for lots of things — nails, candy, scrap metal, and so on. This is a master copy of the exam that would be provided to the teacher, so the spelling words would be dictated to the students. The reading and writing section isn’t clear; possibly it’s a dictation by the teacher that the student is expected to take down correctly. At this time, ‘writing’ still meant mostly penmanship rather than composition.
Arithmetic is mostly calculating percentages* and adding and subtracting decimals. However, we can also see from question 7 that math now includes fractions, something not on the 1895 exam. There’s some information here that is no longer common knowledge. Kalsomining in question 3 was a popular type of thin whitewash used to paint interior walls. The question shows they now need to be able to do measurement conversions between feet and yards and calculate the area of irregular spaces. Question 10 is essentially a volume calculation, but expects students to already know the size of a cord of wood (8’x4’x4′), another piece of information we don’t use widely today but important when many still heated their homes with wood.
Grammar is mostly memorized information about parts of speech and a little bit of understanding in the form of diagraming sentences. How these might be useful in everyday life is a little unclear. I was an English teacher for many years and never had a reason to cite the properties of a verb or the degrees of comparison for adjectives. Notice that there is still no literature included and that all the orthography (pronunciation) work from 1895 is gone.
Geography is fascinating because it reveals what people considered important for kids to know at the time. These included longitude and latitude, why the Erie Canal was important, and all the capitals of states that touch the Ohio river — this last was important because Kentucky is one of those states. Some things, though, are distinctly odd. In question 9, students must locate the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps, and the Wasatch Range. Three of these are major ranges on other continents but Blue Ridge and Wasatch are puzzling. This may be a good example of the kinds of things kids had to memorize — not just the Rockies or the Appalachians, but all the separate ranges that were in them. Other things make sense with some context. Montenegro seems like a very obscure thing for students to know, as does Servia (not a misprint — that’s how they spelled Serbia back then; Roumania is also correct spelling for the time). In fact, the whole list of countries in question 5 seems obscure until you know that Montenegro and Serbia were allies in the Balkan War against Turkey that was going on in 1912. This was the geo-political hotspot of the period — very much the Ukraine or Middle East of its day; in 2 years, it would play host to the events that sparked World War I. If Montenegro still seems obscure, that might be because from 1918 to 1992, it was part of Yugoslavia. It didn’t regain its independence until 2006.
Physiology is wholly new. The questions here reveal that students were beginning to study the human body. Four areas are included here: the skeletal system, digestive system, nervous system, and circulatory system. Question 9 tells us they were beginning to be instructed in health practices. The answers to this question are: Eat right, exercise, get proper sleep, drink plenty of water, and maintain proper hygiene. That gives us a little overview of what they may have memorized. Question 8 is also interesting, primarily because its answer mentions two things: the need to understand how the human body works so we can take care of it better, and that physiology is the basis of medicine and an understanding of it informs what treatments and drugs to apply. Physiology as an area of study is essentially what we would now call science and by 1912 it had migrated from the high schools down to elementary. Today, body systems are typically studied in grade 6.
Civics as a separate subject is now included, with questions about different types of government. There are also questions about the three branches of the federal government and questions about state and local (county) government personnel and their duties. It’s interesting that students are also expected to know what rights Congress does and doesn’t have according to the Constitution, which presumes some familiarity with it. This may have been because two major issues were under debate at the time — whether the federal government could legally collect income taxes and whether people had the right to popularly elect senators rather than having them appointed by the state government. Both of these issues were settled by the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution in 1913. Question 2 is also interesting; it’s asking what governments the students in the Bullitt County schools are subject to. The answers are: the jurisdiction of the local school board, and the county, state, and federal governments in that order.
One-room schoolhouse in 1912; image in the public domain.
History has also expanded to include some major explorers, though mainly explorers of areas in or touching the U.S. It also now includes inventors and inventions like the telegraph, the cotton gin, the telephone, and the phonograph. The telephone makes this list because although Bullitt County was very rural, by 1912, Bell Telephone had established 3,200 rural telephone systems, greatly increasing people’s awareness of and access to this form of communication. Question 7 would likely have been easy for students because 3 presidential assassinations had occurred in the last 47 years: William McKinley had just been assassinated in 1901, James Garfield had been assassinated 20 years before that, and Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated at the end of the Civil War; all were well within living memory of the students’ parents or grandparents. That we don’t study McKinley or Garfield much now has a lot to do with adding 100+ years of history to the curriculum and the need to prioritize major events, shifts, and figures.
What hasn’t changed at all? The bulk of the test still requires students to provide a great deal of memorized information rather than analysis, evaluation, or synthesis of information into a new form. Virtually everything on this test, with the exception of some math and some grammar, could be memorized and written out for the test. As always, this kind of exam is most interesting because it represents what the framers believed was essential knowledge prior to leaving school. At this time, only about 19% of students went on to high school, so this body of knowledge was what the framers thought would provide students with all they needed to be informed, capable, productive citizens of Kentucky in 1912: a functional ability to spell moderately complex words, good handwriting, a basic understanding correct expression, a basic understanding of how your body worked and how to take care of it, a basic understanding of multiple layers of government and which you were subject to, basic geography and specific geography of hotspots, a very broad overview of history, the ability to complete basic mathematical operations, and enough knowledge of common weights and measures sufficient to manage money or goods.
However, change was on the horizon. Just four years earlier, in 1908, Kentucky had passed the Sullivan Law, requiring all school districts to have a public high school by 1910. This gave more students access to higher education, though the state did not yet require them to attend school past 8th grade. By the 1920s, high school attendance in Kentucky would be compulsory and exams like this one would become very important measures of a student’s readiness for secondary education rather than the sum of all they needed to know to be successful citizens.
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* A lot of percentages — the test writers seem very concerned that students be competent in calculating interest, gains, losses, and costs. There’s an assumption here that their adult lives will involve managing their own business interests.