School Daze

by

John T Lockwood

"Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn... Gone with the cracker-barrel, pickle-barrel, milk can." -- from The Music Man, describing items in a turn-of-the-century General Store.

Recently, I was handed a copy of the eighth grade final exam for the Salinas, Kansas school for the year 1895. It was taken from an original document in the possession of the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society. The test is quite extensive and I will not reproduce it in its entirety here. It consists of 45 questions divided into categories: Grammar, Arithmetic, U.S. History, Orthography, and Geography.

The test seemed hard to the person who e-mailed it to me, as it would to most people today. It had been circulated about the Net, no doubt, in an act of self-flagellation to shame ourselves for the skimpy education we give our children these days. Indeed, I found that I could not answer many of the questions and I have a college education and am well-read. But were the eighth graders of 1895 really academically superior? After all, the first thing that struck me about the test was that it was comprehensive  and final – it covered all the subjects taught at the Salinas school and was the only test the students would take at the end of the school year. When I graduated from the eighth grade at the Catholic grammar school I attended, I took separate exams in all the subjects covered by the 1895 exam except Orthography, and I also had to take an exam to demonstrate my knowledge of the rather convoluted theology of Roman Catholicsm (Essay #1 – Name three of Aquinas’ proofs for the existance of the human soul, explain one in detail).  I wonder how many people today could answer most of the questions on my eighth grade final exams of 1960?

Looking at the 1895 quiz, some questions seem not so difficult: Geography #8 - Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?. I would observe that it depends on what time of year one is talking about. New York has a hotter climate than San Francisco in the Summer, colder in the winter. So there! The answer they no doubt were seeking was 'ocean currents'. The famous Gulf Stream moves away from the East Coast in winter allowing frigid water from Labrador and Greenland to impose snowy conditions from Philadelphia to Nova Scotia. Other questions on the test seem a bit broad: Geography #3 - Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean? Well, gee... where shall I begin?

Why does the test seem otherwise hard to us today? It is because the questions themselves are unimportant in the modern world, despite their significance in the context of 1895. Some of the questions are, in my opinion, intrinsically unimportant in any context. For example, the Orthography (spelling) section was full of boring stuff: Orthography #8 - Mark diacritcally and divide into syllables the following: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last. Note that only one of the list has more than one syllable. A more mysterious question is Orthography #4 - Give four substitutes for caret 'u'. Ok, I give up. You got me on that one.

Much of the arithmetic section deals with problems that call for a knowledge of now obscure weights and measures. Arithmetic #2 - A wagon box is 2 ft deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold? Well, try as I might, I can't locate a table to convert bushels into cubic feet. Farmers today must count their corn in dry weight measures, rather than by volume. Other problems required converting bushels to pounds, rods to acres, and square footage of lumber to something represented only as "m". In 1895, we must recall, most Americans (and Canadians) lived on farms. This was especially true in Kansas. The arithmetic that was deemed relevant to the pupils then dealt with that reality.

Three of the math questions addressed another area important to farmers of the day – banks and loans. When borrowing money against crop futures, one must understand what one is getting into. One of these three questions was nasty: Arithmetic #6 - Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months 18 days at 7 percent. Oh well, at least the percent is even. The calculator answer to this one is $25.71. The expected (and therefore correct) answer depends on exactly how the students of the day were taught to figure interest in such a problem. The calculator answer of $25.71 holds if the pupils were expected to use 30 day months and a 360 day year, as they probably were. It rounds to $25.65 if a 365 day year is assumed. The kids would know what bases were to be employed, so that the correct answer would be consistent throughout the class. I wonder how they were taught to solve this problem? Without a calculator, it is a drudgery of long division and multiplication by small fractions. I tried several methods of solving it without resorting to a modern electronic device. I wished to deduce the method most amenable to pencil and scrap paper. Most are pretty lousy. You can divide .07 by 360 to calculate the daily factor. That gives you the unwieldy fraction of 0.00019, which you must multiply by 258 ((8 x 30) + 18 = 258). That yields the almost equally unpleasant fraction 0.049. Multiply that by 512.60 to get an answer of $25.12. The expected answer to the problem might have been $25.80. In that day, before calculators and adding machines, rounding ugly fractions and dropping or rounding pennies in dollar figures was a common practice in business. If one figured the problem by rounding $512.60 to $513.00, one could then multiply $5.13 by 7 to yield $35.91 - the yearly interest. Round that to 36 and divide by 360 to get 1/10 and multiply by the period - 258 - to yield $25.80. This is a pretty good approximation of the exact total and saves the kiddies some tedious figuring.

However, I think the pupils were allowed and expected to use interest tables to solve the problem. Working in the banking industry in the 1960's I gained experience with such tables for working out interest on loans. The tables had daily interest on various multiples of $1.00 for various common interest rates for days 1 through 30,then 60, 90, 120, 150, 180, 210, 240, 270, 300, 330, and 360 days. The flip side of the chart had rates for 365 day basis. These charts were in universal use at the turn of the last century and through recent times when computers and hand-held calculators rendered them obsolete. They made calculating interest on loans a matter of adding a few numbers together.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, some of the problems befuddle me. Arithmetic #4 - District No. 33 has an evaluation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50.00 per month and have $104.00 for incidentals? I frankly don't understand the question.

The history section of the Salinas exam is of special interest because it shows to some degree the mentality of that era. Again, some questions are difficult for us simply because we do not live in 1895: History #1 - Give the epochs into which US history is divided. I imagine the question really referred to 'American History', rather than 'US History', which would then include perhaps epochs such as 'Discovery', 'Colonial', 'Revolutionary', etc. There has been over 100 years of US history since that question was asked of the kiddies, of course. It is interesting to list just some of the events of US history that had not yet occurred by 1895 -- events which would be experienced by those late ninteenth century children as they grew to maturity:

The foregoing were not included in any epoch of US history for the school children of 1895. For them, history ended with the Civil War (which they called The Rebellion. More recent events were considered contemporary. For me, in the 1950's, history ended with World War I --  the Great Depression and the ensuing World War were contemporary.

The most interesting history question was History #7 - Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, Howe? I believe 'Howe' referred to Julia Ward Howe, who penned the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic during the Civil War. She might have been included to give the young ladies in the class someone with whom to identify in the male-dominated history of a male-dominated world. The particular Zeitgeist of the time is most evident in the first four people listed -- all were inventors. The 1800's was the century of the individual inventor, and they were much admired. We have many more inventions now, but they are the products of university research laboratories and corporate development teams. The latter part of the nineteenth century was an era of considerable scientific and technological advancement. Indeed, the modern world was taking shape. The youngsters who sat for that test would live to see the first airplane flight (though even by 1895 th word 'aeroplane' had been coined) and the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Telegraphy (Morse)and the telephone (Bell) already existed, but they would see radio and many even television. But the relics of the olden times still abounded in 1895. Theirs was yet a world set to the measured pace of the horse-and-buggy. That would end soon, automobiles were in their infancy. The Model T would come into their world in just thirteen years, and with it highways, gas stations, suburbs, air pollution, traffic jams and mechanized warfare.

The eighth grade test given to the children of 1895 reflected the concerns of 1895 -- the concerns of their parent's, that is. All children are condemned to waste much of their education learning things that counted for their folks, but will prove irrelevant in their own lives. I don't think the 1895 pupils found this final exam too difficult. They were prepared for it. In those years, the preferred method of teaching was by repetition, the preferred learning was by rote. They drilled and drilled on weights and measures useful on the farm, on the 'Nine Rules of Capital Letters', on the 'uses of rivers and oceans'. Parrot-like, the kids spouted it all back on a June day in 1895. Then they put down their pencils, formal education finished for most of them. They were released from school at this time of the year so that they could help with the planting -- a tradition they would pass on to future generations of schoolkids who would  not live on farms. They walked out the schoolhouse door into a Kansas filled with the clip-clop of the horse team and the creak of the wagon wheel. It was a world of peaceful summer days filled with honest labor in the fields; a world of the parlor piano, the butter churn and fresh game on the dinner table. Ah, tranquility...but it was also a world of diphtheria, the town pesthouse, lynchings, and the early grave.

Did the kids, assembled in the schoolyard after the test, think of the new century that was fast upon them? Did they contemplate its brilliant promises and foreboding omens? Could they sense in any way the things that did not exist but would soon come into being? Flying machines and wireless communications, toppled monarchies and socialist states,  Nazis and isolationists, cold warriors and peaceniks, spaceships and computers, movie stars and teen idols, open-heart surgery and pennicilin --  all these would shape the new century and simply did not exist in the world of 1895.

The kids no doubt discussed the test among themselves: "How did you do? How did you answer such and such? Did you understand the one about the school evaluation?" They drifted off one by one. They left the schoolyard and walked forward into the rest of their lives. They would have kids born in the next century. Their kids would have kids and so forth until their descendants would be sitting for their final eighth grade exams in the year 1995. The questions would be different in 1995, nobody would be converting bushels to cubic feet, for instance.

FIN

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© 20 May 2000