I don’t have stats but in that period of time, but I imagine a lot of “less serious” students were dropping out by 8th grade to work in unskilled labor.
It’s a bit on the nose and does not address the causes of the lampooned state of affairs, but what makes that video even more terrifying is that it was made 8 years ago, not today.
It struck me that germ theory demands at least one question is overhauled. Yet, how would you have tested someone on the preparation for scientifically investigating germ theory?
> In contrast, the 2024 curriculum for eighth graders focuses on critical thinking, problem-solving, and the application of concepts rather than pure memorization. Modern eighth-grade assessments tend to incorporate multiple-choice questions, data interpretation, and critical analysis tasks, emphasizing skills over the retention of facts. For instance, geography in 2024 often includes understanding climate change impacts, human migration, and data analysis using technology. Students are less often asked to memorize the names of specific rivers or capitals and more often expected to understand broader concepts, such as the implications of geographic features on human civilization.
Strongly disagree. A 12 year old has zero chance of applying critical thinking or data analysis to complex subjects like climate change or human migration. It's still memorization, he's still expected to regurgitate a few lines he learned in school.
It reminds me of a time in my first college year when we had to learn underlying principles of ethics-based leadership (I kid you not). It was some kind of bullshit but everyone did his best to take it seriously.
The teacher repeated every time that he wanted us to understand broader concepts and do everything but rote learning.
Almost everyone then failed the exam (based on analysing various situations). The expected answers were word-for-word copies of the teaching material, that sometimes felt unrelated to the question. It was so absurd that we all took it as some involuntary but elaborate joke/life lesson.
Constructivists have been claiming victory since they started, despite the consistently terrible results. So they bury rote learning under a mountain of constructivist jargon, so at least they can show something.
...and what proportion of the public school teaching population is equipped to evaluate critical thinking on such subjects? They're testing for some binary issue spotting at best.
Exactly. It seems like so many people fall into the logical trap that school is about getting you to permanently memorize facts that, in a typical adult life, end up being largely trivia.
School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
Not really. Or if I take that as face value, schools fail at it.
School mainly serves as day care and social programming: obey authority, believe what we tell you, remember what will appear on the test. Some people get more out of it than others.
It’s interesting that those figures would not have occurred in political cartoons, and that you are told to sketch briefly, as if prone to waste time on too much detail.
I wonder to what extent the questions on this test indicate deep knowledge of the many subjects covered, vs. just following precisely those facts taught in the year's curriculum. Clearly students were expected to memorize a lot of different things by rote, but I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't much beyond what's covered by these questions.
This test is pretty much what I had to learn in 6th and 7th grade for grammar and history, though the exams were never that extensive but smaller and every month or so.
Some of the questions are look line bonus questions. I wouldn't have been able to place Serbia on a map in 8th grade (Montenegro didn't exist anymore/yet), but I remember a friend failing a 9th grade test where he was expected to name 30 African countries and either place them on a map or name their capital cities. The test was stupid but not that much outside expectations.
It was mostly B-grade learning: learn the rules, apply the rules or research, reformulate, present etc. Critical thinking would begin in or just before highschool.
Public education is supposed to prepare voters. I see the reliance on historical memorization as preparation to detect bullshit from political candidates.
Somebody already mentioned this inside of a thread, but I want to point it out separately: neither the blog post nor the original image mention what counts as a “passing grade”. It's not wild to think that this was very different in 1912.
I wager it’s subjectively graded and that portable test scores hadn’t caught on. That is, the reputation of the teacher was the measure of a minimum viable student. The census was barely automatically calculated at that time.
On the other hand, you probably spent a lot of your history lessons on World Wars 1, 2, and what’s has happened since, which is obviously not covered here. It’s not that we didn’t learn things, it’s that we learned different things. I don’t think it a a given that what they learned was better.
This is the big question. The blog says "hey, we don't teach memorization, we teach critical thinking".
My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"
Who's right? Are memorization and critical thinking complements, or substitutes?
This might have different answers in different fields. Like in maths, can you learn more advanced maths without a deep intuitive familiarity with numbers, the kind you get from being able to do arithmetic in your head? What about history? Can you get by without dates?
Memorization is rather important in an era where a big chunk of the population was farm workers in rural communities and access to information meant taking the time for a trip to the local library with a very limited selection of books.
Readit News
10% of high school aged people attended a high school?
90% of students enrolled in high school never bothered to attend or "worked from home"?
It would be interesting to know what was the “right” answer to this in 1912.
An indian-australian's semi-recent take on modern "educayshun":
https://youtu.be/iKcWu0tsiZM
Strongly disagree. A 12 year old has zero chance of applying critical thinking or data analysis to complex subjects like climate change or human migration. It's still memorization, he's still expected to regurgitate a few lines he learned in school.
The teacher repeated every time that he wanted us to understand broader concepts and do everything but rote learning.
Almost everyone then failed the exam (based on analysing various situations). The expected answers were word-for-word copies of the teaching material, that sometimes felt unrelated to the question. It was so absurd that we all took it as some involuntary but elaborate joke/life lesson.
School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
School mainly serves as day care and social programming: obey authority, believe what we tell you, remember what will appear on the test. Some people get more out of it than others.
Wikipedia for images:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Raleigh
Sketch one balding clean shaven face and sketch another one with pointy triangular beard?
Some of the questions are look line bonus questions. I wouldn't have been able to place Serbia on a map in 8th grade (Montenegro didn't exist anymore/yet), but I remember a friend failing a 9th grade test where he was expected to name 30 African countries and either place them on a map or name their capital cities. The test was stupid but not that much outside expectations.
It was mostly B-grade learning: learn the rules, apply the rules or research, reformulate, present etc. Critical thinking would begin in or just before highschool.
Deep knowledge wasn't required.
My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"
Who's right? Are memorization and critical thinking complements, or substitutes?
This might have different answers in different fields. Like in maths, can you learn more advanced maths without a deep intuitive familiarity with numbers, the kind you get from being able to do arithmetic in your head? What about history? Can you get by without dates?