Things like this graduation tests have appeared in many books and on the
Internet. It is impressive, but not as impressive as it seems at first
glance, and people often draw incorrect conclusions from it. Americans
often look at Japanese college entrance exams and conclude that Japanese
people must have incredible memories. The newspapers often claim that a
Japanese high school grad knows more than an American who has been through
four years of college. Since I have been through 4.5 years of college
including one year in Japan when it was at the peak of postwar educational
accomplishments and high SAT scores, and since I watch the Japanese
national television news every night, I know from personal experience that
this is bunk. The definitions, curricula and goals of the schools were
different, and this gives you a false impression.
Actually, based on 19th-century textbooks I have read, I suspect this is a
high school graduation test, not a junior high test. But either way, you
should not conclude from this that the average 14-year-old kid in 1895
could have answered this test in five hours or five days. For that matter,
I could have done a pretty good job with this test at age 14, and most
people reading this form probably could have too. Especially in the
questions related to science and technology.
Here are some things you have to keep in mind:
1. The curriculum was quite different. These questions were no surprise to
the students; they have been studying these topics for years. "Studying"
may be the wrong word. For the most part they had been cramming this stuff
into their heads with little or no analysis or independent thinking, and
they could regurgitate it by rote. This is the situation in Japan today.
The students know lots of facts but they are incapable of solving simple
problems independently, and they know nothing about subjects which everyone
knows are not be included on the college entrance exams, such as when WWII
occurred, or who won.
2. The curriculum in 1895 did not cover many of the things that my
daughters learned in high school such as advanced chemistry (including
nuclear physics), biology, DNA, programming and electronics -- because the
subjects were not discovered yet.
3. Most people in 1895 did not attend high school. Only an elite fraction
of the population went, and for most of that small group, this was the end
of their education, so they had to pack into it much that is now covered in
college. In other words, the group of people who took this test were
roughly equivalent to graduates from the top third of US universities
today. If you gave that group a test as rigorous as this, and you limited
the questions to subjects that are covered in most high school curricula,
their scores would be as good as the kids back in 1895. (Actually they
would probably do better if you could control for independent thinking.)
4. Some of these questions would be difficult for us mainly because they
use obsolete weights and measures, such as feet and bushels. I graduated in
1976 and I never bothered to learn anything other than the metric (SI)
system. The question about "bushels in wagons" is dead simple in SI units.
Many kids nowadays master much more complicated math than this, such as
calculus.
5. Many of these questions relate to obsolete skills. We do not write our
own bank checks or promissory notes from scratch anymore. (That is to say,
we do not write out on a blank piece of paper, "Pay to the order of . . .")
If we did, we would all know how to word checks. We have other, equally
obscure skills. When I was 14, I knew how to draft a program for a BASIC
compiler, and I knew how to cram programs into 4 KB of core memory. That
was a lot more complicated than writing a promissory note, and it is not
something kids mastered in 1895, or 2005, for that matter.
I will grant, many useful skills have atrophied over the last hundred
years, and kids are less competent in some ways. But most of these are
physical skills such as hands-on repairing of equipment, operating
machinery, taming animals, hiking, or performing experiments, rather than
mental gymnastics.
- Jed
