Once upon a time, about when your grandmother or great-grandmother were born, public schools had a specific task—to prepare young people to enter the world of business and make a good living. In 1906, a time before the First World War, the Federal Reserve and the income tax, many young people had to start work after the eighth grade to help out their families, and more than a few of them just didn’t like school. Because of that, students who completed that grade at the age of fourteen or so were expected to know how to write legibly, spell correctly, add and subtract without mistakes, and even deal with fractions and decimals.
The people of Cleveland, Ohio were quite proud of their public schools in 1906—until local businessmen started to complain that many of their new employees couldn’t add or subtract. In reaction to that, the school system gave all eighth graders tests to see where the problems lay. One featured deliberate misspellings and sales figures that included adding, subtracting, fractions and decimals. Here it is below:
In another test, teachers carefully read fifty spelling words to their classes, challenging the children to get them right. One hundred forty-four students—a dozen dozen—were tested. Now the reality was that no one did this perfectly. Oh, wait, a young lady named Ione Diggs did get them all correct, but she was the only one. Here are the words:
Think you could spell them all having only heard them? You’re not alone. The average student in 1906 missed thirteen of the fifty, but again, these were eighth graders—kids 13 and 14 years old. The bookkeeping test was tried on 144 students at five different schools (144, being a gross, was kind of a magic number back then). Of the 144 students, just 57 managed to get the final number correct, and each paper contained an average of three spelling mistakes. One student who couldn’t spell “refrigerator” instead wrote “ice box,” and was given credit for originality.
In today’s America there are high schools where not a single student could get a passing grade (70% right) on these tests. In Baltimore, Maryland, where Nancy Pelosi’s father and brother were mayors and Democrats have ruled for sixty years, ”just 7 percent of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93 percent could not do math at grade level.” Among high schoolers only 11% tested at grade level on the state’s math exam—at the five best high schools in the city.
Public education has been destroyed in the past fifty years. Ironically it’s because liberal “educators” are afraid to let any student fail (if the kid’s a minority, that would be “racist”) and because of that, even more of them fail. There will always be students who want to do well, but the ones who want to do the least will do as little as they can, and when that’s zero, that’s what they’ll do.
Even a century ago public education wasn’t perfect—almost no student did perfectly on these tests. Likely you couldn’t make a perfect score either, but at least in 1906 students were expected to learn from their mistakes. Nowadays it seems that mistakes are all they learn.
P.S. Ione Diggs, the one girl who got all 50 spelling words right, went on to Ohio Wesleyan College, married a man named Shepherd and became a society matron in Atlanta. I couldn’t find any evidence she ever tried teaching.