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I will admit that this test would look daunting to "eighth grader me", but should I feel less intelligent than the eighth graders we were producing 101 years ag

I will admit that this test would look daunting to "eighth grader me", but should I feel less intelligent than the eighth graders we were producing 101 years ago? I think it would be more fair to show a criteria of how the students were taught back in 1912 as well. We could easily teach children in grade 8 today to answer the following question: "give at least five rules to be observed in maintaining good health" (question 9 of physiology) by teaching them "the ten rules of maintaining good health" one day in class and moving on the next. Health class and phys-ed today consists of much more than 5, 10 or even 50 rules of maintaining good health. Or how about question 5 in Geography: "locate the following countries that border eachother: Turkey, Greece, Servia, Montenegro, Roumania. If I was growing up in an Ottoman-empire-ruled world, perhaps I would be taught exactly which countries border with Turkey for example.

GabrielF00 13y ago
When I was about that age, NATO was in the process of bombing Serbia. The Balkans has receded a bit from the headlines, but today, Turkey remains critically important to the relationship between the West and the Muslim world. The ongoing struggle between the secular and Islamic forces may be crucial to determining the fate of the Islamic world over the next decades. And of course most of Turkey's other neighbors: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are in varying states of crisis. Something like 100,000 people have died in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Lebanon is in perpetual crisis. Georgia fought a war with Russia only a few years ago. Iraq and Iran need no further explanation. So maybe we should be teaching our 8th graders exactly where Turkey is on the map?
- xenophonf 13y ago
  Don't forget to include Greece in your list.

GabrielF00 13y ago

When I was about that age, NATO was in the process of bombing Serbia. The Balkans has receded a bit from the headlines, but today, Turkey remains critically important to the relationship between the West and the Muslim world. The ongoing struggle between the secular and Islamic forces may be crucial to determining the fate of the Islamic world over the next decades. And of course most of Turkey's other neighbors: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are in varying states of crisis. Something like 100,000 people have died in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Lebanon is in perpetual crisis. Georgia fought a war with Russia only a few years ago. Iraq and Iran need no further explanation. So maybe we should be teaching our 8th graders exactly where Turkey is on the map?

xenophonf 13y ago
Don't forget to include Greece in your list.