January 2022
This month, we asked our writers to consider the true nature of education,
with a look back to older days.
Hard times make strong schools, good times make weak schools
Jack Daly
MSMU Class of 2025
One of the defining features of my time in school was the distinct lack of a clear mission. Sure, every student has ambitions. Jimmy wants to be an astronaut and little Sarah is an aspiring veterinarian, but when they are sitting at their first-grade desks reading a tale about Anansi, they cannot really see what point ‘A’ has to do with point ‘B.’ Answers to the question: "Why school?" were either "We go to school to learn," as a yellow duck repeated ad nauseum on PBS Kids, or a rather vague collection of things that sounded nice which were never specific but gave the impression that school was a magical place that would train us so that we could one day usher in utopia. So, it went on that while my peers and I memorized facts, definitions, and concepts, we would continue making sarcastic remarks to one another about the futility of our endeavors. Here and there were moments of clarity, such as when I was a high school freshman and at last
gained an intimation as to the purpose of English class, although this wisdom was short-lived. Having languished in so many years of confusion, one can imagine my surprise when I recently reviewed a nineteenth-century eighth-grade final exam for a school district in Kansas and found it to be perfectly clear in its purpose.
One will find with a simple internet search that the state of Kansas first implemented compulsory education in the early 1870s, about twenty years prior to the exam’s use. Proficient knowledge of history will tell you that in a rural state, even in an era of budding mechanization, extra help from children was very much needed at home. While some future holders of doctorate degrees probably took the test, most children would be lucky to see instruction beyond that point. As such, the exam was designed to make sure students had received the bare minimum education that would ensure that they could become good citizens. The section on arithmetic asked questions concerning commerce and finance, physiology tested students on their understanding of their bodies and how to care for them, passing geography meant one would be able to understand the contents of a newspaper, and the history portion made sure students knew what had shaped the country.
Perhaps the only subjects that seemed to be without practical value were grammar and orthography. These areas asked questions regarding abstract rules and concepts, but a closer look reveals that students were expected to know what was at the heart of communication. One question even asked students to explain the advantages of knowing proper grammar. Even these skills were necessary, as they ensured one would be able to function in polite society, or, if time allowed, to read a book.
Since the time when the Kansas test was in use, America has seen great development. In the way of education, however, there have been clear signs of decline. One will sometimes see articles bemoaning the nation’s reading ability, particularly among people who live in rural or urban extremes, and there is no shortage of videos of passersby being unable to answer elementary questions correctly.
Some might contend that education has improved in the last century, particularly in the areas of science, technology, and math. The Kansas test neglects to review any basic points of chemistry or biology, but people who did well in health class may be baffled by questions such as: "how does nutrition reach the circulation?" Questions on history are only somewhat more demanding than those currently asked, and there does not seem to be any dramatic difference in the test’s math questions and today’s; indeed the contemporary questions might be harder, but there are just a few differences. No calculators were available at that time, and there is no indication as to whether or not scrap paper was allowed. Even staunch defenders of the customary system may be left scratching their heads as to how much a bushel measures exactly.
The academic elephant in the room is of course grammar, and orthography, a rather large and intimidating word. Orthography is the study of the rules which govern spelling in a particular language. The term itself is derived from the Greek words ‘orthos’ and ‘graphia’ which mean correct and writing respectively, and it is of the utmost importance when using a language where fish could jokingly be spelled ‘ghoti.’ You need only a cursory glance at social media to see that our present culture is considerably unorthographical.
Many blame our lack of skill in the way of words on technological advances. Television has been blamed for the decline in literacy since the 1980s, and now there is, of course, social media, the hated character limit, and ever-diminishing attention spans. The fault does not lie with machines; however, they are merely temptations, the siren song of expediency. All blame rests with us for lacking the integrity, the grammatic and linguistic gusto to speak and write properly. We have moved down the slippery slope from replacing ‘all of you’ with ‘y’all,’ to shortening ‘I’m going to,’ to a horrifying ‘Imma.’
Perhaps the problem is simply learning retention. Maybe most people do fine in school and would have passed the Kansas exam very easily if their curriculum had just devoted a couple of hours to syllabification and the principal parts of verbs. Perhaps the Kansas farmers would forget most of what they had learned after just a month or two of plowing the north forty. This seems unlikely: math was critical for anyone handling the finances of a business, and knowledge of history is essential to everyone who participates in the civic life of a nation.
During my time in high school, my peers and I would often complain of the intensity of our courses, but I would often realize the absurdity of our complaints through a simple reflection on stories from Victorian institutions: poor schoolboys made to memorize French vocabulary and Latin grammar, the inmates of Oxford and Cambridge expected to write series of essays, each one three hours at a time. Compared to those before us, we have an obvious need to resume our studies.
Read other articles by Jack Daly
The big questions
McKenna Snow
MSMU Class of 2024
When someone asks you a question, the way you answer depends firstly on the type of question being asked. The types of questions can vary dramatically, from, what did you have for dinner yesterday, to, can you "name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each"? This second question is taken from the 1895 test that kids had to take to pass the eighth grade. Do most people these days know the answers to these questions? Given that one question on the test was, "Give four substitutes for caret nuä," I’m going to go ahead and guess that most people are like me, and don’t know the answers.
The questions are from subjects like geography, history, and math; that’s all good and well, but are these subjects the only sort of ones that people should invest in learning about? In the context of all these questions, from the "what’s 3+3" to, "list every state capital," there’s a very specific type of question that few public institutions, back then or present-day, have taught people to approach well: these are the "Big Questions," like, is there an objective meaning to life?
Judging from the questions in the eighth grade exam, it doesn’t seem that the kids then were being taught how to think about these Big Questions much either. Largely, we are left to fend for ourselves on these questions, do our own research, and make our own opinions on it. After all, science can’t test and prove questions like if God exists or not, so why teach anyone how to think about a question like that one?
If I were to ask you if there is such a thing as objective morality, or what determines "personhood," what might you have ready in your back pocket to answer with? Would you use any curriculum resources from eighth grade? What about twelfth?
We are taught how to answer questions in the hard sciences; we are even taught how to analyze a beautiful poem or novel according to a given prompt. But on the Questions that really have weight to them over the course of our life, we have been implicitly taught to shy away from them in a public setting because science and material proof allegedly have little to do with answering them.
This 1895 test, and standardized public testing these days, both reveal a startling truth: we have been left to ourselves to answer the biggest questions of all. These curricula largely say, "these topics have little empirical or tangible evidence to work with, so we are not going to teach you anything about how to think about them with yourselves and with others." Now, I am not criticizing public institutions that don’t teach a sort-of "what to think"; I am calling to attention the fact that these public institutions teach us very little about how to think and talk about morality, religion, philosophy, or any of these other "subjective" matters. It’s not about the "what to think" they are not teaching: it’s the "how to think" that they do not teach.
The problem is that curricula like these implicitly declare that there is nothing objective to teach about Big Questions, the answers of which matter enormously to us. Instead, curricula heavily dependent on the hard sciences foster a deep relativism about Big Questions, leaving everyone on their own in the journey to find the Questions’ answers. We have been taught shockingly little about how to approach these questions, both on our own and as a whole society, and there have been consequences. Consider all the bickering, name-calling, arguing, and deep divide between disagreeing groups. We know very little about having a conversation with the people we disagree with, especially on the most important topics.
We should not treat the Big Questions as though our decided answers are inconsequential to others around us. What we believe affects one another, and the way that we live it out affects one another. We should encourage conversation about the Big Questions, because they matter the most. Their answers matter far more than if I can name "four substitutes for carat nuä" off the top of my head.
If we don’t know how to talk about them, or if we are too afraid to ask one another about them, we should start learning. Where our curricula taught us little about how to think, we can learn how to engage in dialogue that challenges ourselves and others. We can offer new perspectives and give charitable interpretations of the other side’s opinion, but we shouldn’t stop there. Don’t be intimidated by relativism’s ironically unapproachable stance. Approach it and ask if it is the code we should all live by (but if relativism claims to be the true stance we should universally take, is it self-defeating since it proclaims nothing we believe is objective?)
The Mount’s core curriculum is a place that is counter-cultural to this relativistic mindset; it draws on ancient and modern philosophies and theology courses, challenging students to approach Big Questions head-on, together as a class—in which most come from differing viewpoints—instead of shying away from them. Liberal arts curriculums like the Mount’s equip people to become comfortable talking about the Big Questions. I deeply appreciate its efforts to embrace challenging topics and to seek the truth. It has shown me the importance of rejecting relativism, pursuing the truth in deeper questions, and showing the goodness of science and that which is empirically verifiable—but teaching me not to stop there.
Go seek out the truth about the Big Questions, maybe even with the very people you disagree with. Go find common ground with them to start on. Don’t be afraid of disagreeing, be afraid of giving up in the pursuit of answering the Big Questions we were never taught to handle. Don’t be fooled by relativism’s charade that says when something isn’t immediately empirically verifiable, it isn’t worth your time. The Big Questions are out there with answers, and they’re worth learning how to think about them, how to talk about them, and how to find their answers. Their answers are worth a lot more than if you can name the Principle parts of a verb.
Read other articles by McKenna Snow
Learning for its own sake
Emmy Jansen
MSMU Class of 2023
I have always loved to learn. Even at a young age, I loved the rigid structure of schools, especially when I was old enough to have multiple classes a day and got to be told where to go and what to learn. I grew up in a family of history buffs, spending every summer at American battlefields and crawling inside restored tanks and planes. We watched documentaries instead of the latest Hollywood blockbuster and I remember reading a John Wilkes Booth biography in the sixth grade, for fun.
Imagine my surprise upon coming to college and realizing that that was not the norm. I came face to face with the truth that education is not equal across the United States, or even in the same town. I was public schooled, which often gets a bad rap for its quality of learning, however I strongly disagree. During college, I interacted with a healthy mix of public, private, Catholic, and home schooled students, and there isn’t a noticeable pattern in the knowledge and education of any of the groups. It seems less that there is one sure way to receive a well-rounded education and more that education is as diverse as the people in this country.
Upon first glance of the 1895 Kansas eighth grade test, I loved how regional it was: common knowledge of the size of a bushel of wheat, emphasis on the inventions of farm machinery, focus on extreme Kansas climate, and deep understanding of the state’s history. Many years of my primary and secondary education were spent on state history, which I am very thankful for. I hope this is the trend at all types of schools around the country because it provides a rich background that serves as a foundation for how we live our lives. Our environments shape us, but we have to understand them in order to utilize them to their fullest.
There are, of course, some stark contrasts in the 1895 test and the curriculum I and other students experienced, no matter what type of school in which we found ourselves. It does ring true today that schools do not teach us things that are necessary and sometimes teach us things that are even unnecessary. I’m not intending to go into a STEM field, yet I was in upper-level math and science classes all through high school. I took a year of organic chemistry in junior year, even though I had already declared in the liberal arts. These facts and skills have proved all but useless to me, while I also graduated high school without an understanding of personal finance, car mechanics, or first aid. There are evident lapses in education today.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the past is to be preferred. This test is from a period during which education was for only a privileged few, especially in a rural farming community where most children would’ve worked on the family farm. Today, secondary education is expected for youth. It’s more accessible, so it’s logical for things to be left out of the curriculum in order for the general population to acquire high school diplomas. Would we rather have more rigorous education and less people educated or more people educated with a less rigorous education?
This might not even be a choice between which we must deciding. If we account for cultural and regional differences between 1895 and 2021, there isn’t much that’s different. The arithmetic section seems unrecognizable at first, but if we translate it into terms this generation would understand (for instance, what the size of a bushel is) the technique is the same as what is taught in basic algebra classes. Just because something looks different doesn’t mean it is, or that it’s any worse because of it. The same goes for U.S. History; I aced that section, as long as you change Kansas history to Virginia history, which I was taught starting in the second grade.
Most of the inconsistencies in today’s knowledge and yesterday’s is just how it’s packaged. I know what the fundamental rules of arithmetic are, but I don’t know them by that name. I know how to use capital letters but I wouldn’t be able to verbalize nine rules for their use or explain why they’re used. This marks a change in how we view education, with less emphasis on memorization and rules and more focus on applications and use.
Some things do not, and should not, change. Grammar and literacy are foundational and need to be taught, arguably more rigorously than they are being taught now. I’m an English major, yet I struggled in the sections on grammar, writing, and diction. Another interesting part of this exam is that penmanship was graded. Cursive has stopped being taught in schools. There are great arguments as to why: unnecessary, time consuming, less critical than other information. But we’ve also lost an art in the meantime; quality of handwriting, and therefore communication, have also suffered.
But, there are things we have gained since 1895. There is no section on biology, chemistry, or physics. The closest is physiology. From early in elementary school, I learned about stars, planets, plant cycles, weather, chemical reactions, and energy. Not only are these subjects important today, but they’re also enjoyable. I can vividly picture learning about planets in third grade, with the entire class hanging onto every word my teacher spoke about moon landings, space expeditions, and rocket ships. Arguably, this is a lot more interesting than syllabification.
It would not be fair to say that one of these two systems we view here is correct, or better than the other. They reflect different cultural values and social conditions of their times. But there is something I see that has not disappeared from 1895 until now. Like the public-private-home school debate, it is based on the idea that education is important. Perhaps it is less about what we learn or how we are learning but that we learn. I may not use any of the formulas or notations from my year of organic chemistry, but I proved over those months that I could conceive of concepts outside of myself. Viewed in that light, 1895 and 2021 aren’t that different after all.
Read other articles by Emmy Jansen
On teaching how and what to think
Harry Scherer
MSMU Class of 2022
"What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?"
As my colleagues have referenced, this is one of the questions asked of students in the 8th grade class of Saline County, Kansas in 1895. If this question was asked of those in my graduating class at the Mount (or, I would venture to guess, at almost any other American institution of higher education), the success rate would be abysmally low.
Has the standard for education changed, then, if 14-year-olds in the 19th century can successfully answer this question but college graduates of the 21st century cannot?
For the sake of context, it is worth keeping in mind that many of the children taking this exam were completing their careers in formal education. Many did not go on past the 8th grade and found themselves in the position to work on the agricultural land on which they were raised. The expectations for this exam, then, would have been higher than many others for which they had previously sat.
In addition, to be fair to us, the children taking this exam spent time preparing for it. When an article appears on The Washington Post, tempting the intelligentsia of an enlightened age to compare their knowledge with that of 19th century children from rural Kansas, the appeal is almost too powerful to overcome. When the curious reader miserably fails the exam, he clicks off disappointed. It is worth remembering, though, that this reader did not prepare for the exam in the way that the Kansan 8th graders would have.
For this exam in particular, preparation would have made all the difference. Some of the questions require analytical skills, but many of them can be satisfied by an answer that demonstrates either basic understanding or memorization. I, for example, would not be able to successfully complete this exam today without preparation. At the same time, I do not think that I would be able to successfully complete many of the technical exams that I was given in high school today, even though I fulfilled the requirements to pass them at the time.
With all this in mind, I would be willing to venture that the majority of my graduating class would be capable of passing this exam with flying colors if they were given an evening to prepare for it. The fact remains, though, that many outside of the physical sciences are not forced to take these sort of technical exams that require knowledge of incontrovertible facts. As a student mostly focused on the humanities, I find that many of my evaluations are either analytical exams, papers, or presentations.
Those who distribute the exam that anticipates our graduation from high school, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), say that the purpose of the test is to "measure a high school student's readiness for college." In college, one is typically taught ‘not what to think, but how to think.’ This tired phrase is the motto of contemporary higher education, and it indicates the key difference between the 1895 exam and our current one.
The 19th century Kansans were certainly taught what to think about certain things. They were taught to think that the way one conducts his speech, i.e., grammar, indicates the extent to which one is willing to conform himself to a certain set of social standards. Through their education in arithmetic, they were taught that certain objective, empirical sets of data exist in the world that demand observation and analysis. Their education in U.S. history demonstrated to them that the actions of their forefathers bear a certain influence on their own lives, emphasizing the temporal effect of virtuous action for their descendants. The list goes on.
Mainstream higher education today does not have the same focus. Instead, contemporary colleges and universities repeat the worn-out ‘how to think’ phrase in order to excuse themselves from providing any positive cultural account for their students. The government of Kansas was willing to take the risk by including some pieces of information worth knowing and excluding others. The modern college does not take the same risk, but instead delegates the act of teaching to the student. This is a strange and ironic phenomenon. Instead of teaching students what deserves to be taught, the modern mainstream college eliminates a core set of teachings, books, and principles and leaves definitionally immature and insecure students on their own to decide what they need to learn. The ‘how to think’ ideal places the rather abstract reality of method in a position of priority above the reality of content. This prioritization suggests that ideas certainly
have consequences, but that students should be more concerned with developing a sense of how to connect ideas with their consequences than confirming the veracity of their ideas. This notion is so preposterous that it is almost hard to believe.
It would be sensible to guess that the modern university is a mere invertebrate defender of moral and pedagogical relativism. The opposite is the case. By removing an absolute norm from a curriculum, a university does not necessarily admit that matters of truth vary from time to time and place to place. Instead, a college removes or weakens a core curriculum in order to integrate, or at the very least allow for, more fringe ideological perspectives into the classroom. This strategy is effective in that professors become less encumbered by a set university curricular standard and become freer to engage with comparatively heterodox viewpoints in the classroom.
Thankfully, this sort of ideological transformation disguised by relativism has not been my standard experience at the Mount. In the vast majority of circumstances, the university has stayed true to a Kansan view of education, namely one that teaches students both how to think and what to think. An institution willing to take the risk to assign value to both how and what to think is one that will last and one that might be held up as a model centuries from now.
Read other articles by Harry Scherer
Read Past Editions of Four Years at the Mount
