When An 8th Grade Was Better Than Today’s Ph. D.

1895 8th  grade final exam


What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895…




Grammar  (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of ‘lie,’ ‘play,’ and ‘run.’ 
5. Define case; illustrate each case.

Arithmetic  (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs? For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000… What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft…?  Long at $20 per metre?

U.S.   History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give  the epochs into which U.S. History is  divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas

Orthography (Time, one hour)
[Do we even know what this is??]
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

and by syllabication.

Geography  (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
4.  Describe the mountains of North America

The exam took FIVE HOURS to complete. 


 My Comments:

I heard Rush Limbaugh give some of this exam’s questions—years ago. When he said, Salina, Kansas, it got my attention. My grandmother grew up in that town. She would have graduated within a few years of 1895 (I’ll have to look up her DOB.) so she would have been asked those same questions.

But. (This is BIG but!) where is the section on religion, on Christianity? Was it left out back then, or taken out of the re-presentation recently? I ask this because our moral and intellectual decline (Never all that strong in the first place!) can be marked from the loss of the family as the center of all reality for children, religious, moral, and educational. Churches and neighborhood schools were initially only helpers to parents. At first, government schools were not in the picture at all—except in Northeastern cities, and then originally under the control of local Protestant sects.

Government school consolidated systems were created in the mistaken European belief that only government could insure a decent and smart people, “good citizens and soldiers” for the state. Never mind this belief was the anti-thesis of our Founding Fathers who believed that “only a moral and educated” We The [Free] People” could ensure liberty, prosperity, and national defense. And they meant education by the society outside of government, not by government itself. That would be a contradiction, for how could a people educated by government offer any protection against the same government that always seeks to overthrow liberty?

Perhaps the greatest lack in our constitutional era thinking was in failing to see adequately that only a society organized around a unified Christianity and culture can more-or-less permanently forcefully oppose the unseemly growth of central government. Individual families and groups of families, separated by deep religious prejudices who could get along only in surface ways, and often were split into often opposing forces by demographics that proved more powerful than their religious beliefs and practices.

All of these splintering societal forces would lead the growth of Big Government’s replacing God, and our eventual sinking, intellectually, morally, and economically.

Fueled by the likes of the practical atheist Horace Mann, early government schools were forced to offer only a “one size fits all” interpretation of Christianity — dictated by the plethora of differing Protestant beliefs—and the hatred and fear of anything smacking of Catholicism.

Thus was born the wedge that eventually to would split children off from their families and churches, all but obliterating the authority and influences of each. and lead to total eradication of anything godly from today’s monopoly, consolidated government schools. But it also destroyed their intellects—and their very souls!

Thus began, in the early 1900’s the institutionalized decline of the “elitist” notion of “learning for its own sake” (Read Richard Mitchell’s 1981 book, “The Graves Of Academe.”) and the mere preparation of children to be good factory workers. The reduction of the body of leaning in even such elite schools as Harvard and Yale between WWI and WWII is well chronicled. As all organized corruptions start at the top, it must by necessity filter down, under the influence of the likes of John Dewey, to every little red schoolhouse in America—not excluding even in Salinas, Kansas.

This is why only an ENORMOUS, and grossly undeserved, miracle from God could save this nation now. There are no more, at most ten percent of the American people who really “get it.” And I am being overly generous. Our economic decline brought on by Big Government, not some kind of runaway capitalism as the Left has sold to a majority of the stupid American public, is the RESULT not the REASON for our present discomfort. We are quickly slipping into an earthly hell because of our loss of intellect and morals. Big Government that is consuming all we have built up over more than 200 years of relative economic freedom, will soon sink our already broken in half Titanic! 

It all started when, back in the 1800’s, most parents turned their children over to secular college educated “school marms”—who, by the way, were expected to live strictly moral lives—unlike today, remain single and celebate, typically living in some women-only rooming house, and would be replaced by another like-minded young woman when said teacher got interested in marriage. In cities schools already had become part of government systems in which secular education was already systematized, such attention paid to Christianity only cursory.

Any start towards reform will come after our economic collapse when the dollar is worthless, teachers won’t get paid, and in a scramble to support their own families will work for garden produce—and forced to fairly, accurately and completely teach the Bible first, as both reading primer and first history of our peoples.

If they then teach the Early Church Fathers along with Greek and Roman histories and stoic philosophies like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero— all children will eventually become Catholic, reform the now almost completely corrupt Church and save America by re-writing and re-establishing the Declaration and Constitution! Only then can the re-building of a free and prosperous economy begin—perhaps only after a long “dark age” period in which the faith and intellect of a new, Christian and Constitutional leader class will emerge.



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