It's always an amusing game to check out exam papers from the schools of the past, so that we can all have a good "tsk, tsk" over how standards have fallen. The very worthwhile website Daily Kos is playing the game with this extract from an 8th-Grade test from 1912 Kentucky.
But hold on - Shock horror! Look carefully at the Spelling Test! What on Earth is an "eneeavor"?
The tragedy is that Daily Kos's writer, glooming and dooming about the terrible state of our education system, ain't doing too well on the literacy himself. In a pronouncement worthy of our former Moron-In-Chief, G.W. Bush, he accepts that "the names of some countries is different today than then". EEK!
And his writing gets worse. (I've sic'd all over this extract.)
(A Note, in case any children of the Texting Age are reading this: sic is Latin for "thus", and it means "this is exactly how the author wrote the material".)
"Many recent studies have indicated that American education has been lagging (sic) those of industrialized countries (sic) . The subliminal (sic) war on education via austerity and transfer of public dollars to for profit (sic) education (vouchers) makes the degeneration of the American education a continued slide to mediocrity." (Hmmmmm....)
Anyhoo, all that aside the article is quite fun; if you want to pit your wits against the children of Kentucky before World War One, you can do so here.
And in fairness, Kos does have some good stuff. Only sayin'....
