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Date Posted: 06:10:15 04/26/07 Thu
Author: SuziWong
Subject: Re: 8th Grade Final Exam in 1895
In reply to: Lynx 's message, "Re: 8th Grade Final Exam in 1895" on 17:53:15 04/25/07 Wed

As an elementary teacher looking over those questions (most of which I could answer with my antiquated education), I see that most would have been answered with rote memorization of facts and lists.

My favorite hoax-busting site, snopes.com, lists this 1895 final exam as “false”. But the exam does raise an interesting question. Are kids today being as well educated as kids in 1895?

Snopes quote:
Just about any test looks difficult to those who haven't recently been steeped in the material it covers. If a 40-year-old can't score as well on a geography test as a high school student who just spent several weeks memorizing the names of all the rivers in South America in preparation for an exam, that doesn't mean the 40-year-old's education was woefully deficient -- it means the he simply didn't retain information for which he had no use, no matter how thoroughly it was drilled into his brain through rote memory

SuziWong quote:
In elementary school, we do still teach some of the important concepts covered on that exam; and some students do learn. (The water cycle--the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers, climate, global warming?, nutrition, digestion, and other bodily functions) But in our global village, can one really name 10 words frequently mispronounced? Tomayto/tomahto, potayto/potahto (sorry, don’t know how to write the “diacritical marks” on my word processor). In Asia we teach the metric system, so there’s no need for kids to know what a bushel or a rod is.

I could go on, but I’ll close with a quote from an Emory University site which sums up my thoughts:

“In the nineteenth century, it took about fifty years to double the world's knowledge. Today, the base of knowledge doubles in less than a year…. The emerging workforce does not need ‘knowers’ as much as it needs ‘learners’.”

Teachers have a much more comprehensive job now than they did in 1895. Hoax or no hoax.
(Lord, I hope I followed the nine rules for the use of capital letters.)

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