Eighth Grade Exam From 1912 Surfaces

[the_tyrant]

I'm not impressed to be honest. This stuff is mainly trivia that has little practical use in modern society.

Modern school is tailored towards teaching skills, whereas education back then was more targeted towards teaching knowledge. Making students memorize facts is no longer an effective use of time in modern education.

Allow me to explain.

When I was in high school, history class was focused on teaching us analytical skills. We didn't have to memorize trivial facts like the date Hitler was born or anything. Because everyone knows that if you needed to know an exact fact, you can just find it on google in 5 seconds. There is no need to devote the majority of time spent in class to memorize specific facts.

Instead, we were taught to analyze historical events and current news. There is no need to memorize historical dates, it takes seconds to find it nowadays.

The same mentality is changing the way every course is taught. Why bother memorizing chemical formulas when the time is better spent teaching students how to balance chemical equations better? Why make programming students memorize the API, when the time is better spent teaching students logic and algorithms?


It all comes to this, 100 years ago, it was difficult to find facts. If you did not memorize a significant amount in your brain, you would spend a lot of time flipping through books and heading down to the library to find the facts that you need.

Now, almost every piece of human knowledge ever is accessible at my fingertips. So the focus of modern education should be teaching students the skills they need to use those facts.