Are YOU smarter than an 1895 eighth-grader?

[SoCalDem]

Could You Have Passed this 8th Grade test from 1895?

6/8/2009
http://www.salina.com/rdnews/story/1895test
David Clouston/Salina Journal
1895 Saline County eighth-grade graduation examination has been Put to The Test
Handwritten notes lend credibility to test

The grandchildren of former Saline County school superintendent J.W. Armstrong found handwritten copies of the grammar questions from the 1895 eighth-grade graduation exam in papers their parents had kept.

The proof is there -- the neat penmanship filling line after line on two yellowed sheets of tablet paper. Seeing the handwriting, Mary Laas thinks fondly of the memories from girlhood of her grandfather, J.W. Armstrong.

A pan of apples usually would sit on the dining room table at her grandparents' -- not unlike apples students would bring for their teachers, and Armstrong had been a teacher. He also at one time had been the county's school superintendent. Armstrong also had farmed and hunted buffalo with the likes of Buffalo Bill Cody.

"He'd tell us stories. That's why I think I'm so interested in history," Laas said.

The two yellowed sheets of tablet paper were discovered in a box of her grandfather's papers this spring by Laas' younger brother, Joe Armstrong. Laas believes they put to rest one of the most tantalizing mysteries surrounding her grandfather -- that an eighth-grade graduation test administered in 1895 is indeed real, not a hoax.

"It was in the folks' stuff, and when we divided it up, he (Joe) took it home and put it up in his closet," Laas said. "I would like to find the answers. But we've gone through this stuff, and the answers weren't in with that.".

snip...
...............................................

http://www.salina.com/1895test/

An entry from Superintendent J.W. Armstrong's journal, found by historian Judy Lilly in the Saline County Register of Deeds Office, shows he gave the exam on April 13, 1895.
Saline County students in 1895 were required to pass the test to graduate from eighth grade. The test first surfaced publicly when it was published on the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society's Web page in 1996.

After some of the test questions were published in the Salina Journal, the test gained national notoriety when it was mentioned by Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio and other media. Most stories and columns centered on the difficulty of the questions such young students were expected to know.

A typeset copy of the 1895 exam was re-discovered almost a century later by a local historian, Helen Crawford, who was working on a book about early school records from Saline County.

The publicity about the test has stirred up controversy over the tests' authenticity by some critics. But this spring, Joe Armstrong and his sister, Laas, discovered the hand-written draft of the grammar part of the test, piled with some of their grandfather's papers that their parents had kept.


Examination Graduation Questions of Saline County, Kansas

April 13, 1895
J.W. Armstrong, County Superintendent
Examinations in Salina, Cambria, Gypsum City, Assaria, Falun, Bavaria, and District No. 74 (in Glendale Twp.)
READING AND PENMANSHIP - The Examination will be oral, and the Penmanship of Applicants will be graded from the manuscripts.

GRAMMAR
(Time, one hour)

1. Give the nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.

3. Define: Verse, Stanz and Paragraph.

4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give the Principal Parts of do, lie, lay, and run.

5. Define Case. Illustrate each case.




snip for the rest of the test,, (it gets harder )

[Libertas1776]

1. It's not surprising the level of difficulty

considering in most places there was no high school or college education. 8th grader was the end of the line and time to summarize your years of education. Of course, I doubt even your average modern day undergrad could ever answer these questions.

[SoCalDem]

3. My mother-in-law taught school with an 8th grade education

:)

[peggygirl]

70. I just passed it with flying colors!

I was taught in schools (Darby, PA) where learning the parts of speech and grammer began in the 4th grade and continues until graduation in the 12th grade, including diagraming sentences.

[DemoTex]

2. No wonder my grandmother was so smart!

As my dad says (and he has a PhD), she was as smart as a tree full of owls.

BTW: Is that test opened-book? :evilgrin:

[aquart]

4. I have a 1946 bowdlerized public school Hamlet.

It has suggested essay questions in the back. My eyes bugged out when I read them. We could barely get lucid answers to those questions from graduate school students today.

[KonaKane]

5. Where is the entire test, in the link?

Perhaps I wouldn't pass this test either.

[SoCalDem]

7. click the 2nd link..scroll down.. the math ones fried my brain

:)

[progressoid]

62. Self delete

[Luminous Animal]

6. Most of the students failed the test.

"Judy Lilly, Kansas librarian at the Salina Public Library, has found school records that show only seven eighth-graders graduated in 1895, the year of the difficult test, whereas there were about 28 graduates the year before and the year after."

[patrice]

8. Just off the top of my head:

1. Use capitalization for:
Beginning sentences
Proper Nouns and proper Adjectives
Titles of persons
Beginning and within titles of books
Months of the year
Days of the week
...
...
...

2. Nouns, Verbs, Verbals, Adjectives, Adverbs, Articles, Pronouns, Prepositions, Conjunctions. Articles, Preposition, and Conjunctions do not take modifiers.

3. A verse is a primary unit of poetry (or musical lyrics).
A stanza is a secondary unit of poetry, comprised of more than one verse.
A paragraph is a set of related prose sentences, comprised of a topic in one or more sentences, one or more supporting sentences, and one or more concluding sentences.

4. Past, Present, and Future:
did, do, will do
lay, lie, will lie
laid, lay, will lay
ran, run, will run

5. Case identifies the function of a pronoun in the syntax of a sentence. It is either Subjective, Objective, or Possessive.
Subjective: Who went to the grocery store?
Objective: The groceries were delivered by whom?
Possessive: Whose groceries were lost?


on edit: corrections to verb tense

[patrice]

9. That's probably not all that great, but, yes, we did have to know that stuff to graduate the 8th

grade (though I wasn't born in 1895).

[wickerwoman]

12. I think with #4 they mean

infinitive, past tense and past participle:

do, did, done
lie, lay, lain
lay, laid, laid
run, ran, run

[tblue37]

That's right. nt

[patrice]

26. That's right. That's how I started out and then got myself tied in a knot over it.

I answered what the verb tenses are.

[tblue37]

15. Sorry--nope.

you said: "Nouns, Verbs, Verbals, Adjectives, Adverbs, Articles, Pronouns, Prepositions, Conjunctions. Articles, Preposition, and Conjunctions do not take modifiers."

Nouns, Verbs, Verbals, Pronouns all take modifiers. Also, verbals are not among the 8 parts of speech, which are:

nouns
pronouns
verbs
adjectives
adverbs
conjunctions
prepositions
interjections

Verbals are nonfinite verb forms used for other purposes than to serve as the predicates in clauses, though participles and infinitives (which are two of the three types of verbals) can be main verbs in verb phrases. Otherwise, though, gerunds are used as nouns; participles are used either as nouns or modifiers or as main verbs in verb phrases; and infinitives are used as nouns or modifiers, or main verbs in verb prhases.

I have to get back to grading (English) papers, so I can't mess with the rest of the answers. But this will give you some info to think about.

[patrice]

27. It asked which did not take modification.

yeah, interjections, that's the one I couldn't remember.

[tblue37]

16. self-delete: accidental dupe

[tblue37]

17. I have to help.

The pincipal parts of verbs are their infinitive, simple past tense, and past participle.

EX:
lay, laid, laid
lie, lay, lain

See my article on the difference between "lie" and "lay." I deal with principal parts in that article. http://www.grammartips.homestead.com/lie.html

[Usrename]

24. -composed of more than one verse-

or, -comprising more than one verse-

[BlueJazz]

10. I must REALLY be a Dumb-Ass...I can't find the Test.

:(

[SoCalDem]

14. link...scroll down

http://www.salina.com/1895test

[dsc]

19. there must be some browser issue or something because I can't see it either

[SoCalDem]

20. try this one.. I think I screwed up when I edited

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/quizzes/8thgrade_test.cfm

[dsc]

25. thanks that works

I have a big criticism of math question 6. Without telling us the compounding cycle (annual, semi annual, daily, continuous, etc.) there is no way anyone can do the problem. Most of the rest of the math would be fine if I knew the units we don't use anymore.

[patrice]

29. And drop by the Sarah Palin article and leave a comment while you're there.

just a suggestion . . .

[SoCalDem]

30. Salina is my hometown.. I am embarrassed that 6K showed up

& gushed over this loon:(

[patrice]

32. I think we should be nice and try hard to educate and add perspective.

Though, I am listening HARD to folk who say to stop giving her energy.

[The Straight Story]

22. in 1895 they could have found the test online

:rofl:

[Cerridwen]

11. No. I don't even have to go look at the test to know the answer.

Our educational system has been designed to destroy any intelligence we might have.

No - this is not a dis' of teachers. This is an acknowledgement of what has happened in the name of "public education."

As far as I am concerned, many teachers deserve the pay and respect we show to grown men playing children's sports.

I wish I lived in a world, in a country, that believed the same.

[patrice]

31. Part of it is teachers. IMHO, Grammar is best taught analytically and I have

had high school seniors thank me seriously for approaching it that way because they never understood any of it that they had encountered, but teachers are under all of this pressure to do the current "hot" methodology and NOT to annoy students (read that - Parents).

By analytically I mean you should take the rules and examples apart, piece by piece and illustrate logically why the wrong answers are wrong and why the right answers are right, i.e. how things function logically or not.

Also, the parents don't read, so the kids don't read and almost no one writes anything original anymore and what writing IS taught in high school does Grammar just as kind of an after-thought, piecemeal, no coherent approach to it.

[SoCalDem]

33. and sometine in the '80, they started accepting "the thought that counts"

at the cost of accuracy & understandability. I MADE my boys learn to spell & to write coherently, but many times the teachers ignored misspellings & syntax errors..and even sent home notes to me, with misspelled words in them.. Being the snarky person I am, I would often use a red pen.... and wrote my answers on the back of the "corrected" note they sent home to me :evilgrin:

[patrice]

37. They're sooo afraid of hurting someone's "self concept" that many are erring in the

opposite direction, so we are turning out students with inflated "self-concepts" and the inflated grades that go along with them.

You can't tell anyone that their work isn't good and you are also told that students must have only enjoyable feelings about your content area. AND if your students have either one of those unpleasant experiences it is your fault.

Challenge seems to be exclusively limited by PC-ness to Athletics.

You're doing the right thing. Power of the peer group aside, parents ARE the primary role models.

[lostnfound]

66. I think in 1895 the kids weren't so strictly classified by age but by skills

Also back in 1895, school wasn't the only lifeboat available in the raging ocean..A person could fail 8th grade and still make a good living with courage and hard work. Failure in school didn't go down on a permanent record accessible to the controllers of the gauntlet. Independent livelihoods were the norm. School was centrally transformed around 1920 into a means of producing worker bees for factories and corporations. It became a central demand, intentionally inflicted on the public throughout the country by a handful of men who spread the word, that ALL adolescents attend through high school. "Extended adolescence" was a goal for a variety of reasons. The net result is the expectation for economic reasons that kids be moved along a year at a time as cohesive, age-stratified groups that are often constrained by teaching to the weakest among them.

[Cerridwen]

34. I disagree. Children learn differently, one from the other.

Some learn analytically. Some learn auditorially (sp?), some learn visually, some learn in the morning some can't think straight until after noon. Some learn linearly, some learn holistically. Our educational "system" treats all as robotic, little cogs.

There are some teachers who don't see students as individual learners. Those teachers need to go away. Those teachers are rewarded. Children are no less individuals because they are children than those of us who are "grown ups."

Parents *should* contribute. Parents *should* be the first in the educational process. When shall we fix "the system" to "allow" parents to their "job" of parenting?

It's far to complex for one post.

[SoCalDem]

42. While children DO learn differently, there ARE standards

that DO exist in the grown-up world of work . NOT teaching children correct grammar, spelling, etc is no favor to them. Someone will ALWAYS be evaluating you , and often the difference between getting a job, and not getting a job, is the way you express yourself...on paper.

I know it's a digital world now, but often the people who are hiring, still exist in a "paper world" to some extent.

With jobs as scarce as they are now, every little edge counts.. a LOT.

[Cerridwen]

51. Standards are based on the "norm."

I don't agree with the "norm."

The "norm" in our world, in this country is based on:

Male
White (Caucasian)
Land Owner (home/'property' owner)
Educated (college or better)
Monied ($5M or over - see FED reports on income gap)
Check the FED reports for who is wealthy - it ain't those who work for others - ever.
Heterosexual
Physically "able"
Mentally "able"
Politically powerful (it ain't the 98%ers - see above parameters)

The gilding on the cage improves as one moves up the ladder towards the "norm." It's still gilding.

If you're posting here - you ain't them.

[patrice]

44. Of course they do, but not absolutely so, i.e. if they were absolutely unique

we could not survive as a species.

There are differences and similarities that vary over time and situations. If it were possible to construct valid reliable instruments to quantify the differences and similarities for a given individual and their learning experiences over time, we'd probably see proportions of similarity to difference that I propose we roughly characterize as somethings like 50:50, 20:80, 90:10 ... depending upon the individual.

And, for whatever a given person's quite possibly strongly unique learning characteristic(s) might or might not be, unless that person is capable of existing entirely on their own, their relationships to their group will require that they LEARN/adapt in ways that serve the functionality of those relationships within a group. No one is saying that individuals have to become totally subsumed in a group, just that individuality can be and is served in group contexts and teachers have responsibility to BOTH the individual and the group.

[Cerridwen]

49. You make good points. You also proceed from the "truth" that what

is, is what has to be.

I question what "is."

We're probably not going to meet anywhere near the middle.

As far as I am concerned, our world is "wrong." Make that, WRONG. I cannot explain that to you in a "logical," linear, model.

The idea that people were put on this planet to serve the "powers that be" and must accept their place in this order and accept the teachings that they may continue this order, will never "feel" right to me.

Call me a woo-woo. Call me...whatever. The path this planet has taken is Wrong.

Children learn differently; one from the other. The "powers that be" decide which form is "normal." "Normal" is Wrong; in my opinion.

As I said, call me woo-woo.

[patrice]

57. Oh no! I am totally with you on that. I work hard at staying positive, but I am VERY

convinced that "we" are profoundly in error. That doesn't mean that "we" don't have some things profoundly right, just that I suspect that right now, and probably for a very long time past, right:wrong is WAY out of balance in favor of Wrong.

It REALLY scares me, but I try to steer a straight course anyway and one's personal inner compass is what you need for that and I believe that that compass must build its muscles by developing its autonomy within its group by being actively in charge of that relationship(s), hence, not only "know thyself" but also "know they group".

Sorry about the runons; it's late and I'm getting tired.

:hug:

[patrice]

46. P.S. There is no such thing as the absolutely relative.

[Cerridwen]

50. :D n/t

[patrice]

52. P.P.S. I believe the dynamic between the individual and the group can and does make the individual

(learning in this case) stronger and ignoring that dynamic, raising people in learning vacuums (pretending that only the individual's learning style matters) makes the individual weaker.

[Cerridwen]

54. Agreed.

:D

It's a delicate balance between individual and "the group." We need to learn to walk that "tight-rope."

[patrice]

56. I'm out of public ed now, doing community ed, where we are offering opportunities to

some of the "lowest" people on the "totem pole" in health care and that situation is very very much about external standards, but the difference between one person and another in the same group context is also VERY much a matter of each person's uniqueness that they bring to the role (stuff that got laid down long before we came across one another), things such as how much the person does or does not understand the intimate relationship between who s/he is as a person and what they do (because it sure as heck isn't about money at that level).

When I taught high school, I solved the problem, only sort of, by constructing rubrics for each assignment that included the same number of individual elements as group elements and all also at equal weights in the overall score, but I always also wished, curriculum-wise, that there were many more, a wider variety, and more finely focused and better "tools" in my curriculum content repertoire.

[DeadEyeDyck]

63. well said

because I was an Army brat, I was educated in Germany, England and home schooled. My father was a Green Beret and met my mother stationed in Germany. I don't think my sister and I could have asked for a better cultural mix. I graduated from UNF at 19 and am now a graduate student at Emory. My Dad was also black, which adds another element to the mix.

Yes, America's education is in the toilet but if you want to learn, there is nothing to stop anyone.

[lostnfound]

65. "Our educational system has been DESIGNED to destroy any intelligence we might have"

Too true. Dumbed down to a thin gruel and people are left susceptible to advertising and manipulation by the powerful.

[hfojvt]

13. I thought Snopes gave a pretty good answer on that

first, as to the grammar rules being questioned, if we had had those rules in school I am sure I could have memorized them and regurgitated them for a test.

Either we didn't learn things that way, or those rules have little practical application and thus I cannot answer those questions.

Second, the math did not really look that tough except for using some archaic terms that I am not that familiar with.

I did get bummed out the other day when I picked up a college algebra textbook at a thrift shop. I figured I would work some of the problems just for fun and to show that I still have it. Instead it turns out I would have to read the chapters before I worked the problems. The definitions of the terms and how to calculate them have been long forgotten just as much as my former Deutsch vocalubieren.

[SoCalDem]

18. *** updated for a **** BETTER LINK

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/quizzes/8thgrade_test.cfm

[Moosepoop]

21. "Define Case. Illustrate each case."

Okay...

There's "UPPER" and "lower."

What do I win? :evilgrin: :dunce:

[SoCalDem]

23. Case Closed

:rofl:

[Odin2005]

48. Um, I'm sure they are talking about GRAMMATICAL case.

Nominative (I), Accusative (me), Genitive (my/mine).

[Moosepoop]

55. Um, gee...

Ya think ?? :rofl:

[Odin2005]

59. Um, yes?

:shrug:

[snagglepuss]

28. .

[Solly Mack]

35. No

but I am livelier

:D

[patrice]

40. ROFL Xs 2!!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[dalaigh lllama]

36. Wait a sec... I gotta look at my hand.

:D

[patrice]

39. ROFL!!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Thanks!

[stevedeshazer]

38. snopes.com says this is false

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp

It's cool, though.

[SoCalDem]

41. Which proves, I guess, that Historical museums and newspapers

are not immune from misinterpreting handwritten journal entries from the contemporaneous time-frames..

perhaps those arrowheads are fakes too :)

ah well...

[stevedeshazer]

47. That's not to say that education in 1895 wasn't tougher than now.

My grandpa graduated from eighth grade in 1912. He knew a lot. Your point is still valid.

[pansypoo53219]

43. that may be true

BUT,i have a early 1900's set of children's books-the book of knowledge. it is a compilation of stories, literature, info, crafts ideas and mind games. and i was blown away of what kids back then were exposed to.

[patrice]

58. The Book of the Knowledge!!!! We had a later version of that when I grew up in

the '50s-'60s and I LOVED it!!!

I still remember things in it fondly today.

Saw a set like ours in Powell's Book Store in Portland, OR, a few years ago, for about $400. Is yours in good condition?

[Usrename]

64. I wouldn't put too much faith in snopes.

They make mistakes, too.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

71. Yes. Someone posted this a while ago on DU and it was shown to be false via Snopes.

[benld74]

45. IF KANSAS is so effin SMART, WHY does it always vote REPUBLICAN?

[Peace Patriot]

53. Interesting. I must have known that stuff in 8th grade, cuz I went to THAT kind of school--

very strict Catholic grammar school where I remember that we spent many English lessons diagramming sentences on the blackboard. I was an "A" student. So I must have known the rules of grammar and the parts of speech at that time. And I remember major terms--noun, verb, pronoun, etc.--and can identify them in sentences. But my mind just goes blank looking at these grammar questions and trying to remember grammar rules as an abstraction apart from examples. The sentence diagramming did impress me, though. I can still vividly remember doing it and feeling such satisfaction when I had accounted for every part of a sentence. I think I am a more visual learner. Abstract definitions bore me and also rattle my brain in some way so that I can't think. I am sure that I would flunk this test now.

I taught English for many years but I did not teach it in that old-fashioned way. I used two main tools: 1) The students had to read lots and lots of books, and 2) The students had to write lots and lots of papers--and got lots and lots of feedback from me. I did not downgrade for grammar or spelling. I only downgraded for desultory effort--they obviously hadn't read the book; or they obviously hadn't engaged the subject; or they had nothing to say and were just writing crapola. I established with them that the main object of writing is THOUGHT--not perfect spelling or proper grammar. I did correct spelling and grammar--if these things were interfering with thought--but I didn't penalize them for mistakes, only for failures of thought, or rather of effort.

I found that this method worked on both privileged, well-prepared students and on underprivileged, ill prepared and troubled students. The former were sick to death of being told how to write and of having to answer leading questions about reading material with the teacher knowing the "correct" or "incorrect" answer ahead of time. And the latter--the underprivileged or troubled had also been badgered in a different way--by constantly getting the message that they were dumb. The emphasis on reading taught them spelling and grammar by osmosis (by example). And the emphasis on thought--on THEIR thought--motivated them to want to learn things they didn't know about proper spelling and grammar.

I started many English classes by telling them that William Shakespeare, the greatest English writer of all time, was such a bad speller that he spelled his own name six different ways. There were no dictionaries back then and no grammar books (except for Latin). But the language was ALIVE with thought and invention. Writing is not a bunch of dull rules. Writing is an art. And so, dear students, invent the language for yourself! Shakespeare did.

I am not dissing the old-fashioned 1895 method, because it may be that teaching any system of ideas, no matter what it is--even Catholic theology (which is quite a "trip" into the abstract)--teaches students to think. Students may reject or "forget" the ideas, but the underlying rules of thought remain indelibly stamped. The abstract grammar rules system for teaching English may have left some people out, though--may have made classes of people who think more visually (or aurally) or by example feel stupid and develop a resistance to reading and writing. For me, the diagramming worked, and may have been how I was able to learn the abstract definitions and rules. All in all, I think the best teacher of English is not English teachers but English writers--story tellers. So the best way to teach English is to get students to read--by any means necessary--and to write, from deep in their souls, what they really think.

[patrice]

61. I agree that the only real purpose of any system is to model processes for

acquiring knowledge and solving questions and once any one system is understood, others can be generalized from it, or paralleled, or extrapolated, or synthesized out of variations, or newly created.

[Peace Patriot]

69. Yup, it almost doesn't matter what the content is. In fact, the human mind is built to

absorb a system of thought and rebel against (analyze, criticize and reject) content if the content is bogus and/or is cruelly enforced, psychologically or physically. But the system of thought, which originates from the cleverest and most enlightened of human minds--the language inventors, the math inventors, the brave, the mental adventurers--and is merely used by unenlightened teachers as a vehicle for unenlightened content--that original system gets stamped on young minds. Thus, I learned what history is--what its enjoyments are, what its uses are-- by being taught Catholic Church history--by Polish immigrant nuns who didn't understand or sympathize with American history--and, although the history of the Catholic Church that I was taught was ludicrously false, I learned to think historically--to be interested in prior ages and to enjoy narratives of the past. My young mind was uneasy with the propaganda but, having no alternative information, I didn't know just how false it was. The stories were interesting, though--the writers knew how to spin a tale. They contained exotic and exciting elements and good narrative structure. When I matured and began to be exposed to other versions of history, I could see how they had fooled me--and also how any history writer can fool you or can be riddled with bias--but the idea of history and the taste for history remained.

I still remember quite vividly the story of Henry IV at Canossa--a great king humbly putting on sack cloth and ashes and walking barefoot through the snow to beg the Pope's forgiveness for 'sins' that I didn't understand at the time. Henry IV had "rebelled" against the Pope, God's agent on earth. The high drama and the wonders of human behavior were the attraction of the story. The narrative had the satisfying conclusion of restoring order to the world--that kings were not above God, that even kings must sometimes be humble, be human, be merely one soul among many. Henry was the true hero of the story because he recognized this and humbled himself before a higher authority.

The true story, of course, is one of sordid politicking and warfare, with the Pope and the Church among the worst criminals of the era--as to bloodshed and powermongering. It was basically a war between Germany and Italy (Henry, king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor wanting to retain the power to "invest" clergy and choose the pope), and Henry's "apology/penance" was an entirely cynical affair to help him consolidate his position as "Holy Roman Emperor," while the Pope's actions were basically "baptism by the sword." Pope Gregory VII formed armed groups--"the militia of Saint Peter"--and allied himself with this army or that army, to enforce papal primacy over the secular state and extend his power as far as possible. He is the pope who invented the malicious doctrine of ancestral inheritance of absolute God-like power from Saint Peter, and established the Church as a monolithic, material monarchy, with transnational power over emperors, kings, secular law and all government institutions, on pain of "excommunication" (consignment to Hell). But perhaps the most unforgivable of Gregory's crimes against the teachings of Jesus was his ban on married clergy. This conversion of the Church into a "boys' club" of repressed sexuality has perverted the Christian religion to this day--and the Catholic Church in particular, with its loathing of women. Gregory VII fomented wars and pitted prince against prince, to consolidate his own power and wealth. He was the re-inventor of "baptism by the sword"--the imposition of religion on unwilling people by violence (which had a brief reign circa 5th century AD, as the Roman Empire was finally falling). His violence in the intellectual and spiritual realms have been the most long-lasting of his wretched legacies. "Free thought" among Catholics ended with Gregory. It became a mortal sin to disagree with the Pope.*

I know all this now. Didn't know it when I first read the story as written by some Catholic prelate with the "imprimatur" of the Pope. But the good writing of the tale got me interested. Thus the inventions of the most enlightened of human minds--the poets of the English language, both high and low, both known and unknown--were utilized by unenlightened teachers as a vehicle for unenlightened content, but the structure of those inventions--the use of words, the composition of sentences, paragraphs and stories--were conveyed to me. I retained the essence--the system of thought--while rejecting the bogus content.

It's STILL a good story--that a high and mighty king enobles himself by humbly submitting to a higher law. It's just that that isn't what happened between Henry IV and Gregory VII--which was, in truth, a mere pissing content between egotistical, power-hungry men.

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

*(Gregory, prior to becoming Pope, presided over one of the first inquisitions, where he forced a thoughtful and learned clergyman and teacher (head of a famous school) named Berengarius to recant his view that the "bread and wine" of the Mass are mere symbolic representations of Jesus' body and blood, not the actual body and blood. The Roman Church insisted on the voodoo belief that you were actually eating Jesus' body and drinking his blood at Mass, and that priests were invested with this magical power to transform the one into the other by the Pope. Berengarius was accused of being "too rational" (i.e., relying on reason, not the Pope, for his beliefs), was continually persecuted, and, like Galileo, repeatedly tried to defend his quite reasonable views but was finally coerced into recanting them, and his life of teaching and study was destroyed. You can only have ONE VIEW--the Pope's view. That is Gregory VII's sinful, self-idolatrous legacy. The dreadful imprisonment of the human mind and soul by 'doctrines' like these could not be more un-Jesus-like, whose only rule was "love thy neighbor." Here's the Church's unctious version of these events:

(Gregory) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06791c.htm
(The man he persecuted) http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02487a.htm )

[AdHocSolver]

67. Your "philosophy" of education is spot on.

Human intelligence develops when people start thinking about ways to solve problems, and then work to solve those problems.

Much of education today has declined to regurgitating rote answers to useless and stupid "questions". There is only one "correct" answer and "innovation" and imagination are frowned upon.

The schools have become little more than education factories to churn out sufficient minions to man the offices and factories of the corporations. As jobs are offshored, fewer graduates are needed, so education is dumbed down further. Then the populace can be blamed for not getting a good education as the reason why they are unemployed or underemployed.

Teaching English by having the students read lots of books, and write lots of papers is precisely the best way to teach the subject. Good writing requires good thinking, and clear thinking is the goal, or at least should be the goal, in all effort.

One important way of learning is to understand and correct our "mistakes". Such effort is never planned for in schools in which the goal is to "cover" as much material as possible. Then we have No Child Left Behind and its stupid "standardized" testing, and we wonder why children aren't learning.

[salguine]

60. I know who won the 1900 Presidential election. Eat that, 1895 eighth-grader!

[JoeyT]

68. It's comparing apples to oranges.

They had more time to get into more specifics on subjects at that time because there were a lot less subjects and less to learn from most of the subjects. Subjects such as science have expanded to such a degree that they've taken a large amount of time away from grammar and math. You can teach an awful lot of sentence structure in the time it takes to learn basic physics or chemistry. When you're learning thousands of formulae instead of "Goddidit." it changes your priorities a bit. Even if we discard the subjects that have been greatly expanded since that time and are much harder (and take a lot longer) to teach, there are dozens of subjects that didn't even exist at the time. I'm guessing Drivers Ed, Computers, and Health weren't a big part of the 1895 syllabus.

I'm not trying to be combative, I'm just pointing out this is usually a right wing meme. "Public Schools are failing our childrennnnzz!" sort of thing.