z42\doc\web\2000\more1895.txt
http://www.snopes.com/spoons/fracture/exam.htm


For what it's worth, here is  an urban legend website's take (Run by Barbara
and David P. Mikkelson) on the 1895 Kansas Examination posted on the Smoky
Valley Genealogical Society website that several posters have cited or
discussed:






Origins:   The first question everyone wants answered is: "Is this real?"
The Smoky
    Valley Genealogical Society of Salina, Kansas, assures us that this is
indeed a bona
    fide copy of an actual school exam from 1895, and it does include
details of name,
    location, and date. If so, something has gone wrong in the transcription
of it to their
    web site, as the Internet version of this exam includes questions not
found in the
    web version, and the section headed "Orthography" is clearly the
"Geography"
    section, while the orthography questions are nowhere to be found.
(Unfortunately,
    their web page ends with the long-circulating "1872 Rules for Teachers"
piece that
    has never been traced to any real American school of the era, which
doesn't help to
    lend credibility to the "1895 school exam" piece.)


    As always, we try to address not so much the question "Is this real or
is it a hoax?,"
    but the question "If this were real, what would it tell us?" Most people
see this exam
    as a vivid example of how much our educational standards have declined
in this
    country over the last century. It may be true that our standards have
declined, but
    several factors about this exam and the environment in which it was
(supposedly)
    given can be misleading to the contemporary audience:


         Today nearly everyone in the USA attends school at least through
junior high,
         and the non-high school graduate is the exception; a century ago, a
student who
         even reached an eighth grade level was the exception. School
attendance,
         especially in rural areas, was sporadic, and many students had to
drop out long
         before completing the equivalent of a modern public education in
order to take a
         job or work the family business. It's not a stretch to assume that
those who
         persevered in completing their educations under those conditions
were more
         motivated and placed a higher value on learning than today's
average student.


         Today's rigid division into grades based upon the ages of
students did not exist in small, rural schools. As the early school
records page on the same site notes, the thirty students at the
school in 1883 ranged in age from 6 to 18, and all were all taught in
the same room by the same teacher. Although there were some rough
divisions of material and students into grades, the modern, fixed
concepts of "every 11-year-old should be in 6th grade" and "every
child who finishes 6th grade should know the following things" did
not exist; students often all studied the same material, regardless
of their ages. Students completed their educations whenever they
completed their educations -- you were a graduate when you passed the
final exam, whether you were 8 or 18 at the time.


         Although many of today's eighth grade graduates (or high
school graduates or even adults) couldn't necessarily achieve a
passing score on this examination (which is difficult to demonstrate,
since we're not told what score was considered passing), most of
today's parents and educators would probably be outraged if the
breadth of knowledge required to pass this exam were all that was
required of a modern public school graduate. Consider what one does
not need to know to complete this examination:


              Absolutely no knowledge of the arts is necessary, not
even a nodding familiarity with a few of the greatest works of
English literature. (Never heard of Shakespeare? No problem.)


              No demonstration of mathematical learning other than
plain arithmetic is required (i.e., no algebra, geometry, or
trigonometry).


              One need only be familiar with the highlights of
American history; absolutely no knowledge of any world history is
required. In fact, one need scarcely acknowledge that any country
other than the USA even exists.


              No awareness of the history, structure, or function of
the United States government (or state or local government) is
required. Not even the ubiquitous "Name the three branches of our
federal government" appears here.


              No knowledge of science is required other than some
rudiments of human anatomy.


              Familiarity with any foreign language (living or dead)
is not a requirement.


    Obviously, many of these differences are attributable to good
reasons: one could hardly expect students to be familiar with art in
an era when books were expensive, art had to be viewed directly
(rather than glimpsed in color photos, films or on TV), and music
could be heard only through live performance; America was not yet a
world power and internal events were of far greater importance than
foreign affairs; the average citizen had little contact with any
agency of the federal government other than the Post Office; foreign
languages were irrelevant to people primarily concerned with running
family farms; and scientific knowledge common to many of us nowadays
was undiscovered, uncommon, or too controversial to be taught in
public schools.  Still, if we want to pretend that this exam says
anything about the state of education today, we have to be aware of
the differences in both directions.


    All that said, this exam is primarily daunting to us in the sense
that any test appears difficult to those who have not recently
learned and studied the material it includes.  Remember, those who
took this test would have been covering all these subjects in school
at the time. From the perspective of one who finished public school
during the 1970s, I can say that this test doesn't really prove to be
all that remarkable upon close examination:


         Arithmetic: This section appears strange to us because the
questions are posed in the form of word problems, and because those
problems include words for measurements no longer in common usage
(e.g., bushel, tare, rod).  Still, these questions don't require
anything beyond a grasp of basic arithmetic skills (e.g.,
multiplication, division, and simple interest calculations), while my
contemporaries had completed a year of algebra by the end of eighth
grade.  Some of the questions are poorly formed (#3: A "bushel" is a

measure of dry capacity, not weight, yet this question depends upon
one's knowing how much a bushel of wheat weighs; #6: This question
can't be answered without knowing how often the interest is
compounded), and others are outdated (#10: Almost none of us will
ever need to write a check on anything other than a bank form printed
for that purpose).


         Grammar: The questions in this section are again posed in a
way that might seem odd to us (e.g., explain the rules of punctuation
rather than correctly punctuate example sentences), but they still
cover basic material.  How many of us graduated from high school (or
even junior high school) without ever having written an essay in
which we were graded on our correct use of elements such as
paragraphs, capital letters, and punctuation?


         History: These are some pretty good American history
questions, but we also have to keep in mind that there was a
century's less history to learn in those days, and most of these
students probably had parents or relatives who had been through (and
even fought in) the Civil War, so this wasn't exactly ancient
history. In an era when the automobile was a curious (and not
obviously useful) novelty that few people had ever seen, names such
as Morse, Howe, and Whitney were as important as the names of Orville
and Wilbur Wright or Bill Gates are to modern audiences; in terms of
elapsed time, asking an 1895 student who Lincoln was would be like
asking a current student who Nixon was; and while many of us may not
know much about the history of Kansas, most of us were probably
required to learn something about the history of the state in which
we received our education.


         Orthography: Well, every era has its own peculiar ideas
about how best to instruct its students in the finer points of
reading, writing, and speaking their native language. Most of my
contemporaries probably couldn't list and classify the "elementary
sounds" of English, but I doubt many 1895 students could diagram a
sentence correctly. Who got the better end of the bargain, I couldn't
say.


         Geography: Again, not necessarily bad questions, but they
evince a decidedly narrow world view. I think that given my choice,
I'd prefer my children have some awareness that places such as Asia,
Africa, and Australia exist and know something about the people who
live there rather than being able to recite the names and capitals of
"all the republics of Europe" or describe "what use is the ocean."
(Question #7 is certainly phrased unusually unless it was intended to
be a trick question, since France was technically the only republic
in Europe in 1895.)


    Whether real or hoax, perhaps this exam says far more about how
we'd like ourselves to be than it does about how we used to be.


    Last updated: 27 April 2000