To be honest, this is already a very charitable interpretation of the 1912 exam in the first place. If you strip out the questions of the arithmetic section, th

To be honest, this is already a very charitable interpretation of the 1912 exam in the first place. If you strip out the questions of the arithmetic section, the remaining questions don't look like a test of "foundational, concrete knowledge" but rather a test of trivia the school board expects you to know. The grammar questions don't ask you how the English language works, they ask you how to mechanically parse a high register subset of the English language (i.e., avoiding colloquialisms) in a very particular jargon. The history section is even worse, treating wars as sequences of Important Battles™ and otherwise seeming to suggest a Great Man view of history.