High school standards in the 1900's?

[AdventureMoms]

So, I've seen several mentions on here and elsewhere of how much more rigorous high school used to be, and how 8th graders used to learn more than 12th graders learn now, how much more literate past generations have been, and so on. I've never seen this so I was wondering if someone has a link or a book about it?

 

FWIW, it comes as something as a surprise to me, because I usually think of my grandpa, who did graduate 8th grade (depression era) but couldn't spell, read, or do math better than the average modern 2nd grader. He likely had an undiagnosed LD, so I don't know how that would have affected his education at the time.

[PeacefulChaos]

My grandpa also finished just 8th grade and he can't spell. :tongue_smilie: One of his sons' name is Brian but he occasionally has misspelled it Brain. :D He used to teach Sunday School and I would go through his notes and correct his spelling in elementary school. (FTR, he's awesome though. He's my dad, by all intents and purposes - I was raised by my grandparents. :) And he really knew the value of hard work! He ended up having a pretty good position in a national company and doing really well for himself. Sorry, I can't help but brag about how awesome he is. :D )

Anyway, sometimes I wonder if things were more rigorous even when I was in school. And I just graduated 12 years ago... but I see books that my grandma kept that were mine, and it has in them the date I got them (which is inevitably when I started reading them, I was a bookworm!) and it's MUCH higher than the standard 'grade level' put on them now. ETA: Wait, that didn't make sense. I mean that the standard grade level put on them now is, like, 7th, and I read them in 3rd or 4th

I also look at, say, the McGuffey readers and think that a good percentage of 3rd grade students couldn't read the 3rd grade level book (if I'm assuming correctly when I think that the 'third eclectic reader' is geared toward third graders). And a lot of people can't spell or write now, either - they let computers do all the work for them. :tongue_smilie:

[dbmamaz]

I once saw a more detailed explanation of that, and they showed an 8th grade graduation test - it had a lot of agriculture-specific information, or outdated information, which people now wouldnt know - not necessarily more rigorous, but different. But i also wonder if schools were able to vary more then - in my local schools the state standards seem to hold back the teachers, as most of the kids are advanced

[FO4UR]

My grandparents both graduated from high school, but they went through the elementary years in one-room schoolhouses, and in a state that is often joked about as being backwards and uneducated. (They were born 1930-ish.) Neither of them graduated college, though my grandpa did take a semester or two. They are very well educated. Their handwriting is fluid and elegant. Their grammar is impeccable when writing or speaking in public, though they often revert back to the old slang and drawl of their childhoods in casual conversation. And, my grandma is very sharp in basic math, THAT I know.:tongue_smilie: (I have no idea how far she went in high school math.) Their knowledge of history and nature is broad.

 

 

Judging by them, I'd say that my high school education paled in comparison...at least in many aspects. I may have had the opportunity to take Calc, Physics, Latin, College Prep English & Writing; but I did not have the elementary level foundation needed to truly take advantage of those courses.

 

 

 

I think you'll find a mixed bag here. I think that the children who were born before the baby-boomers (those who went to one-room schoolhouses) and were lucky enough to be afforded the time to go to school (weren't needed on the farm) had a great foundation, for the most part. If you look at baby-boomers and beyond, you'll see a gradual decline in the basics even while the high schools seem to be advancing.

 

 

That said, look farther back to the 1800's and 1700's. Then you'll see the stark contrast.

 

 

Climbing Parnassus is a good read, btw. It's an apology for Greek and Latin, but the author takes a good broad look at education throughout history. Fascinating stuff!

[justasque]

I think you have to keep in mind that nowadays, everyone, more-or-less, goes to school till age 16. Back in the day, only those who could afford it (as in, didn't have to work), had some interest in it, and had some aptitude for it went through high school. A quick google gives an initial impression that in 1870, 2 of every 100 children graduated high school. So yeah, those two were probably pretty good at academics.

(I have no idea if that link's data is accurate, but you get the basic idea.)

[AdventureMoms]

I did find this 8th grade graduation test. It certainly looks rigorous, and there's no way I could answer many of those questions (even the ones that are not outdated). However, I wonder how common that was? Of my 4 grandparents (all completed at least 8th grade, I think 2 or 3 completed high school, no college) maybe 1 could have passed that test. I don't believe either of my grandmas could have, and I KNOW my grandpa couldn't have even come close. I don't know about my mom's dad, I'm told he was brilliant at arithmetic, but he died when I was 2.

 

I also think some of the issue is vocabulary. My arithmetic is strong, but I don't have the faintest idea what is meant by "Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic". I'm betting I'd recognize the rules and know how to use them if I saw them though. Several of the other questions are similar.

[JoLuRu]

I did find this 8th grade graduation test. It certainly looks rigorous, and there's no way I could answer many of those questions (even the ones that are not outdated). However, I wonder how common that was? Of my 4 grandparents (all completed at least 8th grade, I think 2 or 3 completed high school, no college) maybe 1 could have passed that test. I don't believe either of my grandmas could have, and I KNOW my grandpa couldn't have even come close. I don't know about my mom's dad, I'm told he was brilliant at arithmetic, but he died when I was 2.

 

I also think some of the issue is vocabulary. My arithmetic is strong, but I don't have the faintest idea what is meant by "Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic". I'm betting I'd recognize the rules and know how to use them if I saw them though. Several of the other questions are similar.

 

The answer page is linked at the bottom of the page. The fundamental rules of arithmetic are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

 

I'd have a hard time passing that test without studying!

[Rivka]

I think it's impossible to judge exams like that, though. We look at those exams and think, "Wow, I don't even know what they're talking about - they must have been better educated than I was." But the exams you take are based on the curriculum you study. They sat at their desks and memorized those abstruse definitions. I studied different things.

 

I went to school in New York, so I can actually access a lot of the exams I took through the NY State Regents website. I took the Earth Science Regents in 8th grade. It has questions like: "Which feature is represented by line WX in this diagram? (a) An igneous intrusion, (b) an area of metamorphism, © a former erosional surface, (d) a fault." I could look at the question and think, "Holy cow, back in 1987 kids knew that stuff?" Except that, you know, I did. I studied Earth Science all year, and at the end of the year this question made perfect sense to me.

 

A lot of the questions on the 1895 exam are probably like that: clear if you've studied the specific curriculum the exam was based on, and if not, then not.

[kalanamak]

My grandmother graduated in the 1890s (she was class of 1901 at KU), and I've seen her handwriting. It was beautiful. She was a straight A student in college, and went on to support a family of four kids after her husband died very young. She came out of a very rural high school, but certainly not all kids finished school. The farm kids rode into to town (where her mother rented stall space to many for the horses during the day).

 

My father graduated in the 1920s but it was a bigger town. He said that anyone who planned to go to college took 4 years of Latin. He refused to because he was going to "a chicken farmer and chickens don't speak Latin" (he was raising chickens and selling eggs to help his mother out). He sometimes talked about his science teacher, a brave woman who lead them through many experiments, and it certainly sounded rigorous.

 

When I was growing up I was astounded by what math he could do in his head. Now that I've read Liping Ma and done SM, I don't find is so amazing!

 

My mother did chemistry in hs in the 30s, and it seemed very rigorous.

[SKL]

Well, "1900s" is a broad term. Do you mean a the turn of the century or the whole century?

 

Standards obviously differed depending on location and what the purpose of the education was. Many kids went to school just to get the bare basics so they could transact on a day-to-day basis (and because it was compulsory). The ones who dropped out after 8th grade would probably fit into that category.

 

My dad is dyslexic, and he couldn't read a full sentence until my mom taught him one-on-one at age 30. There were no special teaching methods for LDs when he was a kid. LD kids were considered either lazy or stupid, and teachers didn't bother wasting resources on them. There were no special ed classrooms; the "retarded" kids were allowed to color in the back of the classroom while the other kids worked at grade level. There was a lot of social promotion. Also, kids didn't necessarily start school at 6 if they had learning barriers. My step-grandfather was deaf until he was 14, and they put him in 1st grade at 14. That didn't work out so well, so he dropped out and never did learn how to read.

 

But for those who attended school past 8th grade and certainly those who graduated high school, the standard of learning was higher. That seems like a rather obvious result of weeding out all the kids who had learning problems or lacked motivation to learn. It's very debatable whether it's fair to include all US educational results in comparisons, knowing that we're one of the few countries that doesn't weed out slower achievers from the academic track.

[LNC]

I love reading books set in the early 1900s about high school - ie. the Betsy Tacy series. She studied Latin and joined a literary society.

 

My mom graduated high school in the 1950's from a tiny little k-12 school in the country in the southeast. Her favorite class was ancient history. She is also an excellent writer. My grandpa made sure she was on the business track instead of college, and he was soooo proud she would graduate to become a clerical worker, instead of a factory girl. My mom is well educated though by anyone's standards. My sister asked her to proofread her dissertation for an ivy league university. My mom was my sister's primary resource for encouragment and advice - even more than her advisor. :)

 

My grandmother was a country school teacher even though she didn't go to college. We found papers she wrote dealing with the death of two of her children. They were beautifully written and incredibly moving. She was a very strong, resourceful and intelligent woman. She passed down many books of poetry to me.

 

I would love to read legitimate sources that state the goals and methods of middle class and country schools in the early 20th c.

[tex-mex]

I know in the small rural farming town I grew up in, a nearby village had a one room schoolhouse. My town had the students meet in the local Masonic Hall for lessons around the turn of the century. It was for boys only. By the 1920's, it became a Normal School. And by the 1940's, the first High School was built.

 

Another big deal in our little town was a Carnegie Library that was built in 1912. One of the wealthier farming families donated land for the library to be built and intended to force out the houses-of-ill-repute in the vicinity of the library's new location! There was a (mysterious) fire that destroyed the red light district and Chinese immigrant's homes. The local paper called it, "Opium dens". And a new park and library were built.

Edited July 31, 2012 by tex-mex

[G5052]

One of my grandmothers was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a ranching community, and she often talked about how few of the students stayed through high school. It wasn't a priority, and there really wasn't a mechanism for making trying to get those who dropped out back. She would go visit the parents, but if they said that school was over, school was over.

 

By the time my mother went to school, they had grades, but the majority of the teachers were girls (18-20) who hadn't been to college. The school board would recruit local girls who seemed to have an aptitude and hire them to teach. The high school was a little better with some who had been to normal school (as my grandmother had).

 

As my mother told it, many still dropped out during that period. The boys left to ranch, and the girls left because they were pregnant. She and her sister were the only girls for quite awhile who graduated from high school and went away to college.

 

Our friend who is in her 90's has similar stories from growing up in a farming community many states away from my family. She studied Latin in high school, but by then many had dropped out. She taught music in the school system after 2 years of conservatory (she had to quit because of her father's health problems).

[AdventureMoms]

Well, "1900s" is a broad term. Do you mean a the turn of the century or the whole century?

 

Standards obviously differed depending on location and what the purpose of the education was. Many kids went to school just to get the bare basics so they could transact on a day-to-day basis (and because it was compulsory). The ones who dropped out after 8th grade would probably fit into that category.

 

My dad is dyslexic, and he couldn't read a full sentence until my mom taught him one-on-one at age 30. There were no special teaching methods for LDs when he was a kid. LD kids were considered either lazy or stupid, and teachers didn't bother wasting resources on them. There were no special ed classrooms; the "retarded" kids were allowed to color in the back of the classroom while the other kids worked at grade level. There was a lot of social promotion. Also, kids didn't necessarily start school at 6 if they had learning barriers. My step-grandfather was deaf until he was 14, and they put him in 1st grade at 14. That didn't work out so well, so he dropped out and never did learn how to read.

 

But for those who attended school past 8th grade and certainly those who graduated high school, the standard of learning was higher. That seems like a rather obvious result of weeding out all the kids who had learning problems or lacked motivation to learn. It's very debatable whether it's fair to include all US educational results in comparisons, knowing that we're one of the few countries that doesn't weed out slower achievers from the academic track.

 

I'm not sure exactly when I'm referring to. I'm mostly curious what everyone else is referring to when I read on here about how amazing academic standards were in the past. 100 years ago seems a common reference point for that, so I meant turn of the century. Sorry to be confusing, it was late!

 

Mostly, I'm trying to settle in my head the comments on the supposedly amazing education system of the past and the fact that pretty much none of the elderly people I have known have seemed terribly well-educated. I do agree they had nice handwriting, I'm sure handwriting standards are lower now. But I remember in about 7th grade in the 90's realizing that if I talked about anything academic or school related (in most any subject) no one understood me, even though most of them had gone to HS.

 

I'm thinking there are a couple of factors (the weeding out and simply a different focus), and that the brilliance of a high school education "back in the day" might be a bit exaggerated. Also, the more I read over that 8th grade test, the more it looks rigorous, but not that spectacular compared to what I knew at that age. Certainly I did not know that much formal grammar, but there are other things that aren't even mentioned on there that we had covered a lot of (science, higher math, world history topics)

[AdventureMoms]

I love reading books set in the early 1900s about high school - ie. the Betsy Tacy series. She studied Latin and joined a literary society.

 

My mom graduated high school in the 1950's from a tiny little k-12 school in the country in the southeast. Her favorite class was ancient history. She is also an excellent writer. My grandpa made sure she was on the business track instead of college, and he was soooo proud she would graduate to become a clerical worker, instead of a factory girl. My mom is well educated though by anyone's standards. My sister asked her to proofread her dissertation for an ivy league university. My mom was my sister's primary resource for encouragment and advice - even more than her advisor. :)

 

My grandmother was a country school teacher even though she didn't go to college. We found papers she wrote dealing with the death of two of her children. They were beautifully written and incredibly moving. She was a very strong, resourceful and intelligent woman. She passed down many books of poetry to me.

I would love to read legitimate sources that state the goals and methods of middle class and country schools in the early 20th c.

 

Me too! It's very interesting!

[SKL]

If you ever read Helen Keller's "Story of My Life" (especially the version that includes her teacher's letters re Helen's childhood learning progress), it will give you some idea of what an educated person was expected to know around that time. It is definitely far more than we expect as a baseline nowadays, but then, many children didn't get "educated" in those days. For example, Helen's teacher didn't get to attend school at the regular age because her vision was poor. Had she not received a scholarship to a blind boarding school, she probably would have died illiterate. But the schooling she did end up getting was very good (except, she never did learn to spell well).

 

It just struck me that poor spelling in those days may be a trend. I know that at certain times, they did not teach phonics in the initial stage of reading, or they didn't teach it systematically. I recall my grandmother saying that she flunked the first semester of KG because she couldn't catch on to the teacher's "stupid" lists of nonsense syllables (ham, jam, lam, tam...). In the Little House books, Laura had the same problem. In these two cases, it eventually "clicked," but apparently many kids got lost as far as spelling goes. (Then again, my sister and my ex-boss are terrible spellers too, so maybe that isn't an indicator of anything?)

 

Another consideration is the influx of immigrant populations in those years - most of whom started school without knowing English (if they went to school at all). And they didn't have "ESL" classes. That might have been my grandma's problem, as she immigrated from Hungary at age 4 and spoke no English when she started school.

[SKL]

The test seems pretty standard to me. The questions are either practical or patriotic. What is taught and how it is taught and how we are tested is just different. I don't know that you can say that test is more rigorous.

 

I thought that the practical nature of the problems indicated that an 8th grade education was intended to prepare kids for real-life practical situations, as opposed to nowadays, when we are mainly preparing them for 9th grade. A "word problem" at that level today would be more based on fun stuff or even fantasy. I recall one where the kids were supposed to figure out who had how many CDs in their collection. I also noted there were no computations outside of the word problems. And no multiple choice.

[duckens]

Schools today are pulled in so many directions, it is difficult to be rigorous as the better schools of former generations may have been. Our society is so much more complex, and in so many different ways.

 

For example, in past generations, kids were extremely talented at doing math in their heads.

 

--Could they imagine a standard of typing 40wpm to achieve an A?

 

--Or how to do a search on the internet? (My parents still don't own a computer. My mom may know how to turn one on.)

 

--The concept of "critical thinking": What is a good source and what is not? Do some sources have a hidden agenda? What are the motivations (good or bad) of others? This is especially important when SO MUCH information is available at our fingertips.

 

--Multiculturalism: It could be good to know that there is a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. It could be good to learn how other countries deal, and have dealt in the past with issues of pollution, health care, taxation, transportation, etc. It could be good to understand how our purchase of product X affects people in country Y for good or bad reasons. Since we live in such a global society, no matter how you feel about these topics, knowledge about them is power.

 

I'm not sure that ANY of these were even on the radar for public school 100 years ago, and yet these topics, and others, are all considered part of growing and educating a student that will be a good and effective citizen today.

 

The expectation of what kids need to know is just different than in past generations, and, if anything, our society is moving too fast for our starved education system to catch up.

 

-------------------------------

I also can't help but think about one of my college professors that I worked for in the lab. When he retired, I learned that when he got his PhD in the 1950s, it took only 2-3 years to earn a PhD. That is possible today with brilliance and if one is independently wealthy.....but not probable.

 

Now the expectation for grad school (science) is 5-6 years, with a maybe to graduate, and not a lot of job security or job future in either education or the private sector.

 

What changed between the 1950s science grad school and now?

[SKL]

For example, in past generations, kids were extremely talented at doing math in their heads.

 

--Could they imagine a standard of typing 40wpm to achieve an A?

 

--Or how to do a search on the internet? (My parents still don't own a computer. My mom may know how to turn one on.)

 

--The concept of "critical thinking": What is a good source and what is not? Do some sources have a hidden agenda? What are the motivations (good or bad) of others? This is especially important when SO MUCH information is available at our fingertips.

 

--Multiculturalism: It could be good to know that there is a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. It could be good to learn how other countries deal, and have dealt in the past with issues of pollution, health care, taxation, transportation, etc. It could be good to understand how our purchase of product X affects people in country Y for good or bad reasons. Since we live in such a global society, no matter how you feel about these topics, knowledge about them is power.

 

I'm not sure that ANY of these were even on the radar for public school 100 years ago, and yet these topics, and others, are all considered part of growing and educating a student that will be a good and effective citizen today.

 

The expectation of what kids need to know is just different than in past generations, and, if anything, our society is moving too fast for our starved education system to catch up.

 

I don't agree with this. I think life was plenty complex in the "old days." Kids today may be able to type an internet search into a browser (which takes maybe 3 minutes to learn and my five-year-old can do it), but they have no clue what makes the computer run, or how the electricity is generated, or how to build or fix a vehicle that can get them from point A to point B, or really understand where their food comes from and what factors determine whether it's dear or not. They don't know much about health or healing other than when something gets bad, we go to the doctor.

 

Kids today may have a paragraph about Islam in their 6th-grade geography book, but at the turn of the century, classrooms were bulging with immigrant children who spoke numerous different languages and were diverse in many other ways. And international trade is hardly a new reality. It may not have been a big factor for Midwestern farm kids then. But now, if you test kids in those same regions, they still don't know their geography.

 

There were typewriters back then, but you couldn't type that fast because your letters would stick together. To type an exclamation point, you had to type . and backspace and type '. You had to keep up with the ribbon as the ink was running out etc. And if you made a mistake, you had to re-type the whole thing. (When you say 40wpm, are you allowing any corrections?) Even to write by hand, they had to keep filling up their pens with drippy ink etc. Assuming they could afford a pen.

 

As for understanding critical thinking and applying it to contemporary reading, that is certainly not a modern concept. Politics were not invented in the latest generation. It was more important "back then" to question what you heard, because you couldn't run to the internet and see what all the opposing sides said about it.

 

You can probably tell I'm not a big fan of the "broad and shallow" approach that we keep defending today. There's no point spending time on stuff if the kids aren't going to actually learn enough for it to be put to intelligent use.

[SKL]

I just now realized the thread title is "high school standards." I thought it said "school standards."

 

Obviously I have no business talking about education! ;)

[Lady Florida.]

I did find this 8th grade graduation test.

 

This has gone around the internet often, and is brought back every few years. Here's some perspective on it.

 

I don't know much about my paternal grandparents, but my maternal grandfather had a few years of high school, and my grandmother only went as far as 8th grade. My mother also only had an 8th grade education. As the oldest child, it was her duty to quit school and go to work to help support the family.

[Amy in NH]

 

It just struck me that poor spelling in those days may be a trend.

 

 

At one time, handwriting was much more important than spelling. It was socially accepted to spell the same word in various ways so long as it was legible.

[SKL]

I just now realized the thread title is "high school standards." I thought it said "school standards."

 

Obviously I have no business talking about education! ;)

 

Oh wait a minute, now I get it. I thought it said "high school standards" as in "really high standards at school."

 

Not sure if that redeems me or not. :tongue_smilie:

 

I did inherit some dyslexia from my dad. I read a lot of things wrong - sometimes hilariously so.

[AdventureMoms]

Oh wait a minute, now I get it. I thought it said "high school standards" as in "really high standards at school."

 

Not sure if that redeems me or not. :tongue_smilie:

 

I did inherit some dyslexia from my dad. I read a lot of things wrong - sometimes hilariously so.

 

Though I meant it to be High School as in grades 9-12, the other interpretation works too! Funny. I'm curious about the elementary/middle grades too, now that I've started looking. Apparently I shouldn't type right before bed, though.

[tex-mex]

This has gone around the internet often, and is brought back every few years. Here's some perspective on it.

 

I don't know much about my paternal grandparents, but my maternal grandfather had a few years of high school, and my grandmother only went as far as 8th grade. My mother also only had an 8th grade education. As the oldest child, it was her duty to quit school and go to work to help support the family.

:iagree:

 

You need to look at it in perspective. If you were a woman back then, education was considered a waste. You were expected to marry and rear children.

 

My mom repeated 10th grade numerous times. :D Dropped out the third time when she was pregnant with my older sister and got married. Unfortunately, the marriage broke up after the 3rd child (me) and she found herself as a single parent in 1970 with no skills or education. We were on welfare for a long time. I recall her taking me (I was in primary grades by then) to night school classes at the local high school. She got a G.E.D. and a good paying job as a school custodian.

 

My husband's grandmother dropped out of school in 1919 to raise her sisters and the farm when her mother died. As the oldest daughter, it was expected of her to fill in for the mother. Out of 6 sisters, only one went on to graduate high school and go to college. Hubby's grandmother had only a grade school education but went on to marry. They divorced 20 years later once the kids graduated high school and both were in college. She ended up doing quite well for herself as a secretary. She was frugal and saved every penny. Her kids (my MIL) got their first $$ loan from her to buy their first home when they got married. They paid her back with interest. She had a limited education, but was pretty sharp with numbers and money. She lived up to the age of 96 and died solvent with no debts.

 

OTOH, I have a friend whose mother graduated from high school in 1968, but for some reason, she was told not to expect to go to college. She made a plan to marry a fellow classmate (resulted in a platonic arrangement) who was going to college. If she worked full time and put him through college, he would do the same for her and let her get her degree. The plan only worked half way: he got his degree, but left her for another woman. She was left with a toddler and no college. She somehow got thru nursing school as a single parent and by the 1980's, was a registered nurse. She is now a Nurse Practictioner and close to 60+ years old. Her family never helped her one bit.

Edited July 31, 2012 by tex-mex