An 1895 8th-grade exam from Salina, Kansas, provides vivid illustration of how far our schools have descended from “the 3 Rs” of reading, writing and arithmetic, to three very different R-words. Bill Whittle explains the consequences of re-focusing schools on indoctrination, an investment of learning time which holds little to no value in the marketplace. He adds a fourth R.
The Washington Post published the test a fews years ago:
Here’s the famous 1895 eighth-grade test from Kansas. See how you would do.
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25 replies on “Can You Pass This 1895 8th-Grade Exam? Not with Your Modern Public School Indoctrination”
Moving children from public school will be very problematic if the children are in about 4th grade or higher. The reason is that the public school children are already so far behind their private school peers by that age, a quality private school will likely not admit someone so educationally (and likely emotionally) handicapped. The way to achieve private school for those that are so far behind is for the parents to take up the slack with private tutors and also to become educators of their children, which will require those parents to learn what they themselves did not learn.
It is a very sad state of affairs, and the burden is on the parents that have been absent in the education of their children to fix what they allowed to happen.
Back in 1978/9 I was in Middle School. The headmaster was a Welshman called David T Lewis. Ex-RAF, he’d been a navigator in Wellington bombers during the war and was deeply old school. He always wore an immaculate three-piece tweed suit, the shirt a white not found in nature and his still black hair slicked back.
The eight-year-old me was not good at spelling or arithmetic. David Lewis insisted that I present myself at his office twice a week to answer spelling questions and recite the times tables. If I did not come up to scratch, I got a wooden ruler across my rump or the backs of my legs. I worked hard to avoid that ruler.
At the time I held him in a mixture of fear and awe. Today I love the man. He cared enough to take time out of his week to help me in his own tough love way.
Another great episode, Bill. Just one thing. Activating retired people for education not only would be great for the kids, but the sense of purpose and the interaction with inquiring young minds would also be highly beneficial for the retirees.
We need to go back to only local education. Families need to come together and educate their children themselves.
dreamer of dreams. with the number of single parent families (and that number is rising) that individual parent doesn’t have the time. energy or inclination. k-12 is destroying america at warp speed.
Indoctrination aside, colleges and universities are on borrowed time as the federal largess that largely upholds them will dry up when the students stop going. The lie about a degree being needed to have any life is starting to unravel and the debt required to get the sheepskin is tilting the cost/benefit ratio into untenable states.
I do not remember where I read, but Bill’s idea of using veteran private sector employees (and retirees) as teachers couples with the good part of the internet. We can find the best teachers among the most experienced and create courses that anyone can watch, and if more help is needed on a subject then in person or one-on-one tutoring can be made available. All we really need from a “college” is a properly proctored exam system and whether you’re a 20 year old book learner or 45 year old learn-by-doing individual, if you can demonstrate your competency then you are awarded the diploma / certificate.
On top of that, as more people find jobs in the trades that pay 80k+ per year and that cannot be outsourced (at least until the AI singularity) some of the appeal of college will diminish. Anyone else that joins the gig econony and is essentially self employed can ask their boss, in the mirror, whether they need a diploma to be hired.
young men are already running away from college campuses. now 60%+ of college students are female (i actually read it is 63% but i can’t find the source) and fully 70% of college debt is held by females who don’t pay the debt back themselves. college campuses are nothing more than anti-american anti-marriage anti-white male petri dishes bent on finishing the damage, carnage and mayhem started in k-12. the results prove i am right.
Even the Amish schools around me drill these basics yet our public schools fail to do so.
we don’t have to know anything we’ll become democrats.
right you are dave….the donks have this all designed right down to the last jab.
Not knowing what questions to ask goes hand-in-hand with relying on one resource for information (Google). Both are the result of minds which have been made lazy by the ease of information technology and numbed by a constant onslaught of media. The first is a disincentive to analytical thinking, and the second is a sedative to keep us from questioning the first.
Another danger of the “I can just look it up” mentality is that Mark Zuckerberg & his ilk can decide to rewrite history and wipe the old record on a whim at any minute
Even without rewriting for plenty questions you can get confirmation to either yes or no by just entering it into google that way.
But the really important part is what Bill said. The question itself is the important part. On needs some fundamentals to start asking, and beyond that a thought process, logic, way to draw correct conclusions… I didn’t even get to the scientific method.
The result of LACKING those in the education for decades is more than evident now — people turned into just a dumb flock and blindly follow some appointed truth-announcers. And if their idea is not accepted as self-evident, immediately jump to demand censorship and a way to suppress all the wrongthinkers.
The idea of “debate” and “marketplace of ideas” and convincing others using reason and facts was not lost yesterday.
It really is impressive how The Radical Left has destroyed education in America. It’s going to take a helluvan effort to restore
education, particularely k-12, is lockdown controlled by feminists and their enabling gamma males and that includes the school administrations and school boards, to be clear. they won’t be giving that up for five hundred years and we all know how feminists vote….the donks every damn time.
Not this time – Dems seem perplexed that parents aren’t cool with their daughters getting raped in school bathrooms by boys wearing dresses
temporary setback. one thing the left doesn’t do is give up. not in their dna. besides, the trio elected in va aren’t all that conservative anyway. remember how everone was so high on kavanaugh and barrett? stay tuned my friend.
The Dems never give up, which is why we have to change our mondset of being in permanent combat mode now.
And I have no delusions over who we’ve elected, but it’s still a helluva lot better than the alternatives. I’d given up long ago thinking we’d stay in VA until we retire, but now I’m just hoping we can make it until Little Bob graduates high school before the Dems to Virginia what I watched them do growing up in NJ
Bill, I wish you had a dozen kids! However, I will disagree with your solution – most private schools are as bad as public schools, especially the elite private schools. There are a few schools, like Hillsdale in Michigan, that still teach a classic curriculum and probably some Christian schools, but every school should be vetted carefully.
Schools are no longer needed anyway. A carefully curated internet will teach just about everything most of us would need to know.
I was to asked a related question: is there any evidence that the public schools are any better? In a country where the colleges are utter crap while still manage to grab a fortune, I would not take it as granted. Just from discovering that path A is bad does not follow that another path is good.
Especially if the culture is built around the idea of “entitled” and shelling out prizes without actual work, I’d actually expect plenty of private schools go for even less demands and actual education, just print nice badges for pupils and A+ progress reports for parents. And education be damned.
I don’t dispute your assertion that “most private schools are as bad as public schools.” However, I don’t know that it’s true either. There may be a lot of private schools out there doing a wonderful job but we get the impression they’re mostly bad because the bad is all we hear about. I’m not saying that is the case, only that we probably don’t know. Well, I sure don’t.
However, no matter what the actual situation is, I wholeheartedly agree with you that, whatever school one considers, it should be thoughly vetted first.
Perhaps we should view the term “private school” more literally. It refers to a place that one can obtain a privately-supported education. That includes one’s home. The Western culture has vilified the family to such a degree that a significant count (majority?) of its population neither value nor recognize its primary responsibility:
There are several online grade and middle schools which are not only very transparent, but that are focused on the teaching of the classic curriculum with no bias. Some are free, other require tuition. but, they’re out there.
One I saw offers assistance on setting up a community learning annex to allow multiple students/grades to operate.
There are enough good public, and private, schools that there is no good rule for “is bad”. The schools with and active and involved parental group, where education is valued and money is willing to be spent as needed but not wasted on hollow trappings are the schools that do well.
The bad private schools are not the problem as people can choose to buy their services or not. The bad public schools are such a problem because they get paid whether they produce or not.
The point is that the days of just sending your kids off blindly to be “taught” by someone are over. Parents must take an active role in the teaching of their children – or at least in the supervision of the teaching of their children. The education of children is the responsibility of the parent, not the government or the school.