Asymmetrical Information

"Tragic decline"? Bah!

It is a testament to efficiency that we no longer require our brightest college freshmen to know five languages. Maybe some of the things we ask them to know instead will actually be useful!

I was pleased to see that for someone like me, who has a hard time with languages, there was a mechanism in place that would allow me to substitute other studies. Caesar is 2nd year high school Latin, so I could have done that. I also would have had no problem with the physics and math prerequisites. I don't know how high-school chemistry compares now to then, so I don[t know if I would have been able to substitute chemistry for one of the languages. English wouldn't have been a problem because I was always good at grammar, even if not at writing. As for history, who knows? Probably not. I was less than impressed with "social studies" at the time and I haven't seen any reason to change my feelings. My main problems with history in high school were (1) not very interesting teachers and/or books, and (2) no context within which to place historical events or actions. I was amazed when as an adult I read Samuel Elliot Morrison's "History of the American People" because the motivations as well as the events were spelled out, thus finally making sense of a lot of history that seemed peculiar to me.

Let's face it--how many people really thought in high school about why Europeans would sail off into the Western Seas (i.e., the great unknown) on several small ships looking for spices? Face great danger just so your food would taste good? Didn't make sense, but the history books didn't say why people would do that. An off-hand comment from my father put it all in perspective. It turns out that there is a period of time, a couple of days, actually, during which meat begins to turn bad. It's smelly during this time, but not usually dangerous to eat. Spices = pepper for most of the spice trade at the time. Pepper, in addition to preserving meat, also disguises the taste of meat starting to go bad. This means that pepper (i.e., "spices") was equivalent to at least several days worth of refrigeration in a society that had no refrigerators. No wonder Columbus and others tried to find better routes to the Far East! So much of history comes down to economics, which wasn't taught at the high school level when I was in school.

My Husband knows five languages. Latin, Greek (working knowledge of) Russian, Latvian (fluent) and English (native). Doesn't make him more intelligent or more likely to get a job. Just makes him a tad-bit annoying.

I would also like to point out that while there is just about the same amount known about the classics there is a great deal more known about geology, chemestry and physics and just about any science you want to think about. In addition, I took "basic algebra" in High School as well as advanced algebra, geometry and calc and note that these are college level courses at Harvard in 1892.

Historical note. This kind of thinking was what led to the formation of a new generation of institutions of higher education that stressed practical subjects like engineering and business administration in the mid to late 19th century. Some local examples (I live in Philadelphia) are Drexel University (formerly Drexel Institue of Technology ) and Lehigh University. These institutions tended to by founded or endowed by practical business men with relatively little formal education like the Philadelphia banker A.J. Drexel (Drexel) and Pennsylvania railroad magnet Asa Packer (Lehigh) and coal barons Ario Pardee and John Markle (who made large contributions to my alma mater Lafayette college). Although these men had immense respect for education they saw little use in spending three or four years the studying greek and theology. Since that is all the Harvards and Princetons of the world were interested in, they started their own schools that stressed more practical courses of study. I'm not as familial with the history but I think Jane's alma mater at Chicago falls into this same catagory. Certainly the Wharton School does.

this was an ironic post, right?

"this was an ironic post, right?"

Were you but conversant in five Indo-European languages, drilled in elementary rhetorical forms, and practiced in critical discourse; you would confidently recognize irony at sight. That you must beg elaboration provides more anecdotal confirmation that public standards have, alas, declined.

The "standards were much higher in the olden days" argument fails because standards were higher for a very much smaller group of people. In the eartly 20th C only 10% of students finished high school. In the 1890s it was fewer than that. The perentage that went to college was tiny.

If you look at the skills of the top fraction of 1% of students today -- stretching into fields that didn't even exist in the 1890s -- they won't look so poorly compared to those Harvard students of yore. That's the more accurate comparison.

As to *mass* education, the schools that provided it going back in time generation-by-generation were no better than they are now -- really on the whole they were worse, in some cases a lot worse.

The difference from now is that it didn't matter nearly as much then. When 90% of the population is getting its education by going to work instead of high school (or even the higher grades of grammar school) the quality of the education-for-the-masses school system isn't nearly so important as when *everybody* has to get a *good* high school education just to have the hope of getting a decent job.

"That you must beg elaboration provides more anecdotal confirmation that public standards have, alas, declined."

alas pouncer, i fear that my intellectual foundations and comfortable illusions of the efficacy of my past education are crumbling, even as i speak...

Jim Glass:

"If you look at the skills of the top fraction of 1% of
students today -- stretching into fields that didn't
even exist in the 1890s -- they won't look so poorly
compared to those Harvard students of yore. That's the
more accurate comparison."

Except I don't think the Harvard students of 1892
are comparable to the top 1% of students of today.
Instead the Harvard students of 1892 were more like
the wealthiest students of 1892. Now inherited wealth
probably has some correlation with aptitude for
learning, but I doubt it's that strong.

Further let's say we did know the academic aptitude
of the average harvard student of 1892 expressed as
a percentile, it would be less meaningful than it
might at first appear. The reason being that there
was a significant proportion of the population who
through lack of opportunity simply weren't in the
academic achievement sweepstakes.

My guess would be that if they'd grown up in the
present the average harvard student of 1892 would
have been, say, the 65th percentile. I mean I just
picked that number out of the air, but it seems
reasonable to me.

So then the comparison from past to present is what
an elite 65th percentile was able to achieve in 1892
compared to the 65th percentile today.

Many people are making the point that mastery of
Greek and Latin seems of limited utility and suggesting
that other subjects are being taught today instead. That
would be a fine argument if only it were true.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

FPL, "Pennsylvania railroad magnet Asa Packer"

Ah yes, I remember him well. Attracted to all kinds of iron, he was. ;-)

"this was an ironic post, right?"

I think you merely meant to ask if it was a joke.

Caught me fair and square PJ. Must be why I couldn't get into Harvard.

"I think you merely meant to ask if it was a joke."

Are you being sarcastic?

Well...it really is not as simple as some of the contributions here suggest. Of course, in 1892 a far smaller number went on to college. But over the last fifty years during which about half of the high school graduates did go on to "higher education" they have been performing at progressively lower levels. Evidence? Not only the declining SAT scores but the declining GREs! Another proof (as well as cause) of the decline is the steep-sloped down-dumbing of the curriculum.

Ask any fairly honest veteran of academic life (from the humanities or social disciplines: I have labored in the latter for over forty years)whether the kids now (as compared to a few decades ago) are as literate, historically-informed, mathematically competent or as capable of writing or speaking with coherence and style--and the answer will be either a resounding or a whispered "No!"

I speak English, Vulcan, Klingon, Romulan, and Portugese.

And Harvard still rejected me.

Spock: The politically-correct on the selection committee deducted points for knowing English, and the others for Portuguese. 8-)

"Not only the declining SAT scores but the declining GREs!"

IQ tests have increased as the generations go by; what you're thinking of is the recent decline in SAT scores due to more people taking it. It's a statistical artifact of the bigger population taking the test; the SAT isn't just for elites anymore.

Jim Glass: I think Mark Amerman is right; Harvard was a school for "gentlemen" rather than necessarily for the intellectual elite well into the 20th century. Of course the two classes do overlap a bit ;-)

And while it's true that most Americans didn't graduate high school, let alone college, in the 19th c., I suspect that what they studied even in grade school was quite a bit tougher than the material for students of the same ages today. I've seen sample pages from McGuffey's Readers and the like that would stagger a current elementary-school teacher.

Jason: I seem to remember that not only the average SAT score, but the absolute number of very high scores, had declined. If that is correct, it could not be explained by the greater number of students taking the test.

PC Grump #1: It would have been useful even to the Harvard class of 1892 to know how the ancient Chinese or Japanese thought.

PC Grump #2: I'm not entirely sure these admissions standards weren't honored in the breach. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, failed at least one math class and was a notoriously bad French speaker.

That said, the justification of language teaching is extremely elegant.

FPL: as for Chicago, it sort of does. See, Rockefeller was a very practical chap, but he was also determined that his University would be the best there is, which meant hiring a lot of high-falutin' academics. Harper et al were having none of this practical business, they were far more interested in building a hybrid between the Ivies and the European research Universities. So the intent (at least the donor's intent) was the same as those other schools but the outcome was almost the opposite. This is the school where the most practical major available is Economics, which is basically a major in applied math. The B-School is very much the exception to the rule. (Rockefeller also wanted the U of C to be the great Baptist University of the Midwest, that one didn't work out so well either)

I have it good authority that SAT test scores today are vastly higher than they were in 1892.

One amusing thing to me is that I am old enough (32), sadly, to see my friends begin to lament the decline in performance and values of current college-age student in contrast to those of...the George H.W. Bush era! Yes, you wouldn't think that the late 80s and early 90s could be considered a golden age, but apparently it takes just a modicum of blinkered hindsight to become aware that "kids these days" aren't as honest and hardworking as we were. One even noted that young adults today don't know how to parent, in contrast to her own parents in the 80s. And don't get me started on the dramatic dropoff in the quality of baseball players over the last 20 years.

I really think this could be an interesting topic of conversation. Before getting started, however, we would need to dispense with the idea that our memories (and our imaginations concerning the 1890s) are good judges of what the past was really like. These are serious and difficult historical questions, which anecdotes cannot settle.

Considering this passage:

Changes in the form of examination set by the college in many of the old subjects of study have altered the whole course of preparation in them. These great changes have been so slow and gradual that the general public has almost no knowledge of them, and even many of the preparatory schools have no adequate appreciation of them.

with its three consecutive "them"s, I'd say that ordinary English prose style, at least, hasn't gone downhill much. I'd have been fried in high school if I wrote like that.

As to the actual state of American education around the beginning of the Twentieth Century, one might look here:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/articles_of_the_month/goldin_virtue.html

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