About them good old days . . .

From Education in the (Not Very) Good Old Days by Assistant Village Idiot. Commenting on something I have mentioned a number of times. Regardless of quality of education at any given point in time, we also have to consider quantity. When looking at an impressive curriculum from a university in 1910, we have to consider that only perhaps 5% of students attended college then. From the post:

Conservatives like to go on endlessly about the good old days of education, and how their grandfathers had gone to one-room schools but rose to become physicians or chemical engineers or whatever, because the education was superior then despite the lack of resources. I lean pretty conservative, but this is just nuts. Education was terrible until quite recently.

Bloggers and blog-commenters who think about the history of education, changes in pedagogy, and can relate this to their own experience and that of their forebears, who can construct a coherent paragraph about the topic are not a representative sample of the country.

You are not a representative sample.

Are not a representative sample. You are the 1%, in that metric. The 5%, actually.

Your anecdotal experience is of nearly no value whatsoever in discussing the situation.

Let me bring in related statistics about years of education in the population as a whole in the decades before and after this, in order to make a distinction. From the National Center For Education Statistics:

Progressively fewer adults have limited their education to completion of the 8th grade which was typical in the early part of the century. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had completed no more than an eighth grade education. Only 6 percent of males and 4 percent of females had completed 4 years of college. The median years of school attained by the adult population, 25 years old and over, had registered only a scant rise from 8.1 to 8.6 years over a 30 year period from 1910 to 1940.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the more highly educated younger cohorts began to make their mark on the average for the entire adult population. More than half of the young adults of the 1940s and 1950s completed high school and the median educational attainment of 25- to 29-years-olds rose to 12 years. By 1960, 42 percent of males, 25 years old and over, still had completed no more than the eighth grade, but 40 percent had completed high school and 10 percent had completed 4 years of college. The corresponding proportion for women completing high school was about the same, but the proportion completing college was somewhat lower.

Indeed.

My mother-in-law graduated from high school in rural Alabama in the mid 1940s or so. At a family reunion some years ago, old yearbooks were pulled out, old friendships discussed, incidents of youth, etc. It was an interesting conversation.

While she and her sister and friends were swapping stories, I leafed through the yearbooks.

Among the things I noticed were a couple of items.

1) More women were graduating high school than men. I subsequently discovered that this was in fact the norm from the early part of the last century.

2) The age of those graduating had a far greater standard deviation than to which we are accustomed. Today might be 16-19 with an exceptionally tight cluster around 17-18. Her small graduating class of perhaps 50-100 had individuals from 15-23. And the outliers weren't one offs.

The point is, similar to Assistant Village Idiot, what we hold in our minds about high school rarely takes into account what it was actually like in the past. Fewer people being educated. More people leaving early for employment. Greater age variance.

But also, in some respects, perhaps also a higher quality and a greater capacity to deal with students as individuals.

I am looking at a textbook from my mother's junior or senior year in high school, also the late 1940s. The Federal Union - A History of the United States to 1865 by John D. Hicks. I see Wikipedia has it classified as a university text and possibly it is from her freshmen year, but I doubt it.

Regardless, it is a first rate historical text which could easily be used today. In fact, it might be desirable to bring it back, as many academic fads and reinterpretations have not delivered as expected. Certainly, it is striking how much ignorance is currently being spouted about direct democracy and electoral colleges, etc. which could be addressed by just having the spouters simply read a seventy two year old text which would give them a far better grounding than they apparently obtained with contemporary texts.