I don’t know whether to be ashamed I know (and knew even less in 8th grade) few of the answers to this test or relieved that I am apparently not alone. The Smoky Valley (Salina, Kansas) Genealogical Society made public the questions to the 8th grade final exam use in 1895. As Minding the Campus notes, the most disturbing fact is:
Case Western Reserve’s Ted Gup, in the April 11, 2008 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes about how little his students know:
“Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries – China, Cuba, India, and Japan – not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses – half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975.”
A study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could read a ”complex book and extrapolate from it.” Furthermore, the study found that far fewer college graduates are leaving school with ”the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure and physical activity.”
We are a long way from discussing Orthography intelligently.
