Posted by Gaishan 10/28/2024
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.
I can't even read it on my small phone screen and I'll be d*mned if I have to zoom in
But maybe it's too much to ask of modern Americans to understand that spellings of proper nouns can and do change over time.
Remember that big hot war in the 90s?
And there was that thing in the 40s, too . . .
Ah, when the Servians shot down the invisible airplane, because they didn't see it. I remember :-)
Is this AI-generated? It certainly has all the signs of being so.
I've read real books from the late 19th and early 20th century, and while occasional typos do appear, their density here is suspicious.
Thus my conclusion is that I don't think this is a real 8th grade test.
https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191... - on the answers page they also acknowledge the typo on "eneeavor".
https://headsup.scoutlife.org/would-you-pass-this-test/ - 2013
I believe the misspellings in the spelling section are intentional so that the student will identify them—I am guessing that’s the point.
"Decline I" is a request to decline the pronoun "I".
Edit: there's also "secrate" and "Pres dent"
edit: The test seems to come from this page from the county's museum: https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191.... The WayBack machine records the first snapshot in 2012, so AI seems unlikely.
They note the spelling errors
> Note that there are several typesetting mistakes on the test including a mistake in the spelling list. The word "eneeavor" should be "endeavor." This version of the exam was probably a master version given out to the schools (note that the spelling words wouldn’t be written on a test.) The museum has been told that the exam was handed out in a scroll form (that is why the paper is long.) The typos would have been corrected simply by contacting the teachers and telling them to mark their copies accordingly, much like would be done today. And there might not be quite as many typos as you think; "Serbia" for example was indeed spelled "Servia" back then.
Current generation LLMs does not make smelling mistakes, only humans do.
Even the best of existing image generation models often spell words hilariously wrong when asked to generate an image containing text.
But sometimes their messassage gets mangled in intersting ways
(To be clear, I don't believe this is actually generated by AI, but in this case, but since we're looking at an image, I can see why some people might be concerned that it might be AI given the misspellings.)
But yes in general it's a reasonable concern to have.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/fcell...
