if you look at this grade 8 exam from 1895, you’ll find that there are some impossible questions to answer for your average post-secondary educated person. a lot of these questions seem so hard to me that i wouldn’t be surprised to see them on a comprehensive exam for a present-day english grad, not on an exam for those graduating elementary school. so it seems to me that in the last 100 years, we’ve gotten progressively stupider and stupider.

i can see a trend of stupider-ing even in the past five years. it seems that every year most of the exams i write are easier than the old exams i memorized looked over. it almost feels like i’m learning less and just being pumped through the engineer producing program. but then i’ve realize that it’s not necessarily that we’re learning less, it’s that we’re learning different material. i guess on all those exams that i’ve seen, the courses have changed such that instead of learning some material in depth, we learn material in breadth.

so that makes me feel a lot better about being stupid. sure, those people in the 19th century knew crazy some grammar and speeling, but they didn’t know a lot of stuff that we do know. would they know how to drive a car? how about calculus or balancing chemical equations? could they not die from tuberculosis or polio or smallpox? maintain a birth rate less than sustainable? play warcraft? survive in scarlem?

we still learn a lot of skills, it’s just that the skills we’re learning now aren’t necessarily more valuable than those in the past. the good things is that as long as we have a group of intelligent people researching and developing for society, it’s ok for stupid people to go crazy over reality tv and ebonics.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs