A Strikingly Different Education From Today's - Bullitt County's 1912 Eighth Grade Examination

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow.  Learn as if you were to live forever."  Mahatma Gandhi - a distillation of his teachings

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One of the themes of this blog is the importance of education & in particular what you do with that education to obtain a prosperous, happy, & fulfilling life.  South Carolina Senator Tim Scott calls "a quality education the closest thing to magic in America today.  It is the great equalizer.  It is the issue that allows for each & every family today living in poverty to believe that the American dream is alive, it is well, & healthy, & coming their way."

But the last three posts (really most of the education posts of the past several years) have focused on the decline in student learning & the failures of our education system that have led to shortages of all kinds of professions - e.g., doctors, engineers, pharmacists, air traffic controllers, policemen, & more

I know young people who do not aspire to the aforementioned professions & have worked to become plumbers, welders, & auto mechanics.  But they had to learn their skills somewhere like under the tutelage of a skilled tradesman.  

Unfortunately I also know young people who are going to work for the post office supposedly for the security of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), the National Association Of Letter Carriers (NALC), or the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU).  Yet even here some USPS jobs require a mandatory 70% minimum score on the Virtual Entry Assessment, aka the Mail Carrier Test.  Much like applying for a job as a toll taker next to an E-ZPass lane this is not a worthwhile pursuit of a fulfilling career.  It is short sighted - a lot can go wrong.

Regardless of how successful any of these tradesmen or union employees may become, they probably stayed in school through the eighth grade & if they couldn't read & do math @ an 8th grade proficiency level they were @ a disadvantage going into the world whenever they finished school.  Those who were successful most likely worked to remove their eighth grade shortcomings & those who didn't are part of the occupational shortages the country is experiencing.

I know of an industrial accident in a metal finishing plating facility involving aluminum & hydrofluoric acid.  Turned out that the operator could not read.  Upon finding this out the superintendent of the facility said he did not want anyone in that plant who could not read or measure.  Click here to see the chemical reaction in a laboratory experiment & then just imagine the danger of the explosive hydrogen fumes shooting as high as the 35 foot ceiling in the plating room - all caused by someone who couldn't read.

Whether you have aspirations to be a neurosurgeon like Ben Carson (whose mother could not read but made sure her sons could), or a plumber or stone mason, or a letter carrier - it is to your benefit to be able to read & do math after leaving the eighth grade.

Now there is a connection between poorly educated people, obesity, & government dependence.  You can't expect poorly educated people to know or practice good nutrition. The National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases reports for adults that 30.7% are overweight, 42.4% have obesity, & 9.2% have severe obesity (Body Mass Index of 40+).  For children & adolescence ages 2 to 19 it is 16.1% overweight, 19.3% have obesity, & 6.1 % have severe obesity.

And don't think that just going to college is the universal panacea for what ails us,  Neither the high school graduate tradesmen or college graduate engineer or accountant have been taught American history in decades - it is extremely dangerous & very likely that a country can be easily changed whose people are unfamiliar with its history & heritage - in our case the founding principles of limited government, personal responsibility, & free enterprise.  Being poorly educated, fat, lazy, & having no will or interest to distinguish right from wrong pretty much described the people in the Roman Empire right before it fell.  

Andy Kessler reports in his March 17 WSJ column that "in 2024, only 22% of Chicago 11th-graders could read @ grade level.  Only 19% were proficient in math."  After decades of similar statistics, who can think this is working out well for these people or the country?  Businesses aren't hiring these people, they are investing in robots.

Contrast all of the foregoing with the following 1912 Eighth Grade Examination for Bullitt County Schools presented by the Bullitt County, Kentucky museum pictured above.  Students had to pass the exam to finish eighth grade & become eligible for high school.  There was no internet to make people smarter - I know it has made me a lot smarter.  And there was no OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini to use to cheat their way through school like is happening more & more today in a new era that takes grade inflation to another level.

1912 Eighth Grade Examination for Bullitt County Schools

This copy of the Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the museum. We thought you might like to see what the test looked like more than a hundred years ago. Obviously it tested some things that were more relevant at that time than now, and it should not be used to compare student knowledge then and now.

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.

Bullitt County Schools were mostly one-room schools in those days, scattered around the rural county. Students came together at the county courthouse once or twice a year to take this "Common Exam." It was apparently a big deal. The local newspaper urged students to do well, even urging seventh graders that it was not too early to start preparing. Some scholarships were provided to those who passed to go on to high school, which was also a big deal back then. In those days, high school was sometimes another county away and a rare thing for many farm children to be able to otherwise attend.

And remember to smile a little while reading this exam. It has been great fun, as well as a challenge, to think about the questions, and to come up with answers for 1912 and for today. For example, it has been interesting to see disagreements on even the basics, such as what is a "cord," much less the actual answer to the question, or the much more controversial questions about government and about "who discovered...". Smile. We are all learning from this test.

Our staff has put together possible answers on another page for your amusement.