Posted by Gaishan 10/28/2024
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"?
Wouldn't that make them factory workers rather than students though?
According to the top comment, only about 10% of students attended high school at the time.
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":
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.
They would lack any info about world wars, decolonization, computers, space race, internet, climate change, just to pick some topics taught today.
The people who built all those things and won two world wars were educated with this curriculum. They took us from horse and buggy to space travel, clearly they were doing something right with education.
More broadly, home schooling seems to be more effective in 19th century America. Edison likely never took any test and definitely never attended a college that depended on it. He was home-schooled because his hearing was so bad.
It's true though that if you're learning math the focus is on learning math, not theorizing new branches of mathematics. The reason being that most topics are cumulative. You can't study abstract algebra if you didn't pay attention in high school algebra. In that way, they force conformance. But largely I think this is a good thing.
This sort of thing also applies to English/Language Arts. In order to comprehend more complex media, you have to be able to comprehend simple media. Often, I hear people lament about how school didn't teach them about real life. Typically, the reason why is because they didn't pay attention in English class. There's a lot there.
Also, intelligence is virtually worthless without knowledge. Intelligence just describes potential. If you don't use that potential, it's no different than if you had no intelligence at all.
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.
If you've got a system that can reliably take a citizen earning $40,000/year and turn them into a citizen earning $140,000/year, governments from all over the world will beat down a path to your door. Over a 40 year career that's an extra $4 million in taxable income.
I can think of many other examples of the government fleecing citizens into poverty (medical care, just to give one), enriching a few corporations and wealthy individuals at the expense of the general welfare. A government that cared about its citizens making more money wouldn't have hundreds of thousands of them living on the streets. If the government actually prioritized increasing tax revenues I can point them to some very rich companies and individuals not paying their share.
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?
Not true IMHO. You can map it to a some sort of neighbouring countries graph and a few other facts.
So the opposite of irrelevant. You need 10 minutes before you can start to think about the question that was likely a premise for a larger argument.
"To be a surgeon, knowing surgery techniques from memory is irrelevant. When called upon to do surgery, I can simply leave, attend medical school, then come back and do the surgery. What's really important is knowing where the medical school is located."
The claim was "you need memorization as a starting point". And that's the part I disagree with. Ability - it's irrelevant. Speed of doing it in specific cases - relevant.
Today I can tell you that 7 x 7 = 49 but back then I'd have just gone 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 quickly and said "49" for the same answer but a slight delay.
Parents who were taught times tables and didn't do much later mathematics are often confused by the way we teach kids today, because they expect we'd try to cram the tables in there, but that's not actually useful, what's useful is seeing the pattern and we'd prefer a child who maybe doesn't know off by heart what 9x8 is but sees the pattern, and whose first question when the teacher finally explains exponentiation and shows how it relates to multiplication, is, "Does this keep going forever?" which yes, it does, there are more hyperoperations and they do keep going like this forever. That child understood the pattern, 9x8 is a problem a calculator can solve, understanding the pattern is something else.
Dates are only important as they relate to each other, their specifics are almost always meaningless.
There's a difference between rote memorization and committing to memory through practice.
I mean, there is still some rote memorization needed at times, but you want to minimize it as much as possible.
The mathematics is simple. The rest of it is stuff that is simple to Google. There’s a little bit of interpretation, but none of this is about problem solving or any kind of serious analysis.
Perhaps I am out of the loop, but are kids allowed to Google stuff during tests nowadays? In my days we were not allowed to bring any books or notes to a test, and up until the last two years of high school no calculators either.
All this besides the obvious that Google wasn't available back then. I guess many schools didn't even have a comprehensive library, let alone enough copies of a particular book to have many kids borrow them at the same time.
Perhaps ironically, the ability to appreciate this point is not something you can achieve with Google (or by looking it up in a book). You have to think about the meaning of your experience of using your mind as you have gone through your life.
At one time I memorized 1132 digits of pi. There was no point to doing this other than to experience the process of memorization and recall, itself, in a relatively pure form. I've lost most of those digits now. But the insight I gained-- which is not about retrieval but about a way of seeing and interpreting the world, stayed with me.
THAT is education: the mind I've created and my process of creating it.
Funnily enough we're always carrying a calculator and (access to) Google in our pockets. Not that I share his view, I do think knowing facts and figures is necessary.
Have you ever seen anyone under the age of 30 try to "google" something? It's bizarre and disturbing. I've seen it for myself, but on r/teachers they have horror stories. To hear them tell it, most kids fail not by cheating, but by being unable to google anything with which to cheat. Even if we dial it down to balance the exaggeration...
Inability to search with more than one keyword. Inability to decide which words are unimportant in a sentence to leave them out of the search terms. Inability to add extra words to give the search engine enough context (funny story about a high school chemistry teacher telling them "reaction" doesn't work for that unless they also include "chemistry" or "chemical"). And on and on and on.
So memorisation was necessity.
I'd much prefer my children to have concrete knowledge and prepared for the world. Frankly, they'll be plenty prepared for the job market. Many of the folks I work are barely able to function outside of their role at work -- order all their food, can't change a tire, outsource all knowledge, etc. They're probably like the aristocrats in the 17th - 19th centuries, where they know only what they need, servants take care of the rest.
It's not representative of the average American during that era - who would not have made it to 8th grade.
Heck, in 1910, Kentucky had a 17% illiteracy rate [0]
The fact that illiteracy using the IMF definition is non-existent in the US automatically means your average 8th grader today is better off than one a century ago.
And if I'm honest, the exam itself doesn't seem that different from content I dealt with in 4th-6th grade and I was attending an urban lower middle class school back then.
[0] - https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1910/Vol1...
That said, Germany's functional illiteracy rate is estimated to be comparable to the US [0]
It's a similar story with PISA as well - most other countries use it as a dick measuring contest by testing at gifted schools, but the NCES tries to randomize PISA testing in order to actually benchmark subnational performance and identify laggards.
Although I assume illiteracy indirectly implies that you can speak the language in some acceptable form, I would imagine it would be similar to living in another country without knowing the language. You go into the McDonald's click on the pictures of the food you want, press the big green button, then use your plastic card.
And note that very few counties in the US have a score above 276, which is the top of the range described as "Respondents can paraphrase or make low-level inferences."