That only an "8th Grade education" our grandparents had

Poirot

Poirot

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Way back then they only had an 8th grade education, what did they know....?
What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895... Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
8th Grade Final Exam: Salina , KS - 1895 Grammar (Time, one hour)1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of 'lie,''play,' and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000.. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.. Long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour)[Do we even know what this is??]1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane , vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks
and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each..
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth. Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete.Gives the saying 'he only had an 8th grade education' a whole new meaning, doesn't it?! No wonder they dropped out after 8th grade. They already knew more than they needed to know!No, I don't have the answers!
 
I've had lots of folks use the "8th grade education" excuse when trying to get out of cognitive activities - yet they passed them all with flying colours. My first job was in a rural area, where they had to choose between helping on the farm after 8th grade or going to high school in another town (often boarding). Needless to say I never let those patients off the hook because of their supposed "lesser" education.
 
Gotta tell you, that 5 hours seems rather a short amount of time for that test. In fact 1 hour for each section seems very short. That said, (I know a lot of those answers, but definitely not all, or ever 3/4. LOL) but I am a super genious when I listen to the idiots who Leno finds for his man on the street segments.
Last night 3 said Mount Rushmore was in Washington (I think they meant D.C.) and could not name them. The Seattle Space Needle was identified as the Washington Monument, while the Vatican was said to be in the Middle East.
 
Jason, that's interesting. My mother had to board in town for high school. My dad and his mother got a house in town and came home to the farm on weekends. People made a lot of sacrifices for the basics in those days but they developed character through it.

Barb, thanks for posting this. I so enjoyed reading it, even though I know I wouldn't be able to pass such a test either. One thing that stood out to me was the absence of multiple choice questions!
 
B2, that's interesting. I don't know what they meant by applicant. Being in a different time period, there could be several possibilities. My grandfather taught at a country school near here to help work his way through college. Perhaps people who weren't college graduates could make application to teach in those days. If so, they might have had to pass a rigorous exam in order to do so. I don't know which grades he taught but schools were few and far between in this area then so I'm guessing all ages and levels might have been included. Ah, how I wish I had asked him more questions about a lot of things!
 
When I first moved out to the suburbs, it was into a little subdivision surrounded by farmland. In fact the land was originally the Oscar Hammerstein farm, and his farmhouse was the town hall/police dept. LOL
The lst grade teacher was an absolutely fabulous teacher, and had been the teacher of the one room schoolhouse, which was still standing. She started when she was only 17 or 18. Tiny bldg. So when the subdivision was built, the builder nicely included schools, and so she moved into a nice 8 classroom brick bldg. It took years to learn she had never gone to college, and only a year or two of high school Just was so bright, and in that farm country, (just like the Waltons, it seems) she was willing to take on the task of teaching the children of the farmers..thereby gaining so much experience. She was a better teacher than many who had college teaching degrees...and after she retired..a newly built school was named for her.
 
I agree, that is a cool story! The man who taught me 4th and 5th grades did not have a degree. I thought he was the best teacher ever. I didn't know until many years later that some folks around resented that he taught without the degree.
 
That is so insane. I'm going into Grade 12 in September, and the first exams that I ever wrote were in grade nine. I've never written an exam that has been longer than two hours, being math, biology, chemistry, and physics.

The whole grammar part of the exam makes me feel so dumb. We were taught very little about the parts of speech and such, way back in like grade six, and we barely reviewed anything. My friends and I were all talking about how this past year, we honestly learned nothing in English class.
 
boy, i remember having to label every word in a sentence in English class. Noun,pronouns,verb,adverb, adjective, conjunction, and so on.

I don't think schools (depending on individual states) really teach geography, history, English, Civics any more. It just seems many young people now just have no idea where Nebraska is located,or whether British Columbia is on the west coast or east coast, or where Custer's Last Stand was fought.
 
I also had to learn all the parts of sentences. We had to diagram them. I was surprised when my daughter, an English teacher, said they don't teach that anymore. She didn't even learn it.

I also was surprised to learn the whole world didn't study Texas history as much as we did here in Texas. :rotfl:
 
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