Posted by Gaishan 14 hours ago
Using Pythagoras, it's the square root of 30*2 + 40*2. It effectively a 3, 4, 5 right angle triangle.
A2 + b2 = c2
And this is pre-calculator so the number is one of the squares that the kids would have memorized. 4^2 + 3^2 = 25 = 50 feet.
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.
In college anything below a C put you on academic probation. In graduate school anything lower than a B put you on academic probation.
A memorable classes being Electromagnetism 4 where the passing grade in my year was 8% and Quantum Mechanics 3 with 15%.
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...
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."
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.
It is hard to apply an agenda on an educated and internet-connected populace. Internet connectivity is still useful as a control/propaganda mechanism, as the available content can be centrally influenced (think RT News ban, "community guidelines" moderation, etc.). So it is chosen to gradually erode education over time using a variety of pretexts, so that the population will gradually regress from self-thinking citizens to obedient subjects.
If you are referring to the exit exam in the link, you also have to remember that grade 8 in 1912 was available to a privileged few. This filtered out people with learning difficulties whose families didn’t feel like spending money on school was a worthwhile investment.
Those that had the means to attend school in the 1900s also had time to dedicate to study.
What's 21st century capitalism's plan for people who aren't any good at Latin and Greek?
Also, you are comparing expectations on top students in one case and expectations on overall population including the lowest ranking students. Likewise, reading at "grade level" is fairly high standard that massive amount of Kentucky 1912 kids would not clear ... because no one taught them to our current grade level standard.
Americans colleges teach biology, physics, chemistry to a pretty high level. Entrance to the top universities is also massively more competitive then it used to be.
The answer depends on who you ask. It you ask this to what you probably would call 'capitalists' the answer would be "school choice, school vouchers, home schooling and more vocational schooling instead of useless college 'degrees' in lesbian dance theory and the like". Ask those who consider themselves to be the "defenders of the oppressed" and the answer would be "more money for teachers (unions), get rid of standardised tests because they are 'racist', get rid of those 'books written by dead white men' and replace them with books by 'diverse' authors, get rid of school choice, close top education schools because they attract mostly asian and white pupils, lower admission demands for 'diverse' people, cancel student debt, etc.".
I think the former approach is more likely to lead to a return to sanity while the latter will just lead to more dismal [1] results, what do you think?
[1] interestingly enough my phone autocorrected that word to 'Disney' which somehow seems fitting
And the latter one are to large extend strawman.
Let them become homeless and addicted to fentanyl and slowly wither away and die or have to resort to crime to survive then lock them up and tax the people who are good at Latin and Greek to pay for their upkeep or UBI so they don't get robbed or murdered on the street by the people who aren't good at Latin or Greek and have nothing left to loose.
Yeah, but the vast majority wouldn't, so isn't this contradictory? Is he trying to say 8th graders could pass if they studied or had the identical question in advance? That, too, I am skeptical of. Maybe some could, but most would not.
The reason is because the corpus of knowledge is so large. It's not like those are the only questions, but rather drawn from much larger reading. This is why even well-educated adults do poorly on general knowledge tests--what is considered 'general knowledge' is quite vast.
The difference now vs. 1912:
Emphasis on specialization for gifted kids, but also considerable intra-classroom variability of skill, so you have some kids learning multi-variable calc at 9th grade (not at school, but rather at local college, private tutoring , or self-study such as online with apps), and on the other extreme, others still struggling with fractions.
In 1912, the strugglers would have been weeded out by either dropping out of school or learning a trade. Mandatory k-12 school was not yet a thing. So there are selection biases here. Same for demographic change.