Questioning Snopes: What does this 1895 Eighth Grade exam show?

This is one time I may disagree with Snopes. Snopes examines and evaluates "urban legends" of the kind that make their way around the cyberspace community via emails. One of these messages -- "1895 Exam" (Snopes, July 9, 2007) -- begins like this:

Could you have passed the Eight Grade in 1895? Probably not ... take a look:

This is the eight-grade final exam from 1895 from Salina, KS. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

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8th Grade Final Exam: Salina , KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.

2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.

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.

6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.

7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

The exam continues with portions devoted to Arithmetic, U.S. History, Orthography, and Geography, with equally daunting questions. (Do people even know what "Orthography" means these days?)

Now the truly interesting thing about the story, of course, is precisely how daunting the questions are and what this may suggest about the status of education in our own day. In fact, Snopes' own bibliography includes Dan K. Thomson's "A Little Education Once Was a Lot," Scripps Howard News Service (19 June 2001), in which, after reviewing such a story, Thomson says:

The object of this exercise was only to reveal what many of us have known for some time. The dumbing down of American public education over the past 100 years has been substantial, particularly in the last 50 years. When Great-grandma says she only had an eighth-grade education, don't smirk.

What I find peculiar, though, is Snopes' response to the story. Usually Snopes examines the sources of an "urban legend" to see whether it is authentic, and then offers a verdict: "true," "false," or else it sorts out the parts that are true from those that are false. But what Snopes did with this story was not to authenticate its credentials -- to determine whether the exam was historically authentic or not. In fact, it didn't really question its authenticity or even seem interested in that question. Instead, what Snopes did was to formulate the question it posed for its own investigation, as well as its verdict, as follows:

Claim: An 1895 graduation examination for public school students demonstrates a shocking decline in educational standards.

Status: False.

In other words, Snopes is interested in trying to rebut the import of Thomson's claim, and the obvious suggestion of the published exam itself, that our public education today is in any way deficient when compared to that of the 19th century. The Snopes article goes on at considerable lengths to argue why the test should not be taken as betokening a decline in American public education. For one thing, Snopes argues, the exam requires no knowledge of the arts, literature, algebra, trigonometry, foreign languages, or world history. If today's students or even adults "can't regurgitate all the same facts as their 1895 counterparts," says Snopes, "it's because the types of knowledge we consider to be important have changed a great deal in the last century, not necessarily because today's students have sub-standard educations."

I do not deny that what our society considers important today has changed since the 1800s. Yet I think many of these changes have not been necessarily for the better. I do not have in mind so much the topical expansion of education to include many things about such subjects as world history and science that were virtually unknown in 1895 in the U.S. agricultural belt where Salina, KS, is located -- such as the difference between Shiite and Suni Muslims and the virtues of safe sex. Rather, what I have in mind is a sea change in attitudes about the value of substantive and rigorous learning which leave so many graduating from high school and even college today without knowing the most fundamental facts necessary to excelling in a fully human life. Further, students may even graduate without knowing the most basic cultural data considered standard fare by most educators today (See, e.g., our post about the "Culture Quiz" [Musings, June 30, 2006] administered at Lenoir-Rhyne College -- soon to be "University".) I think Snopes missed something on this one.