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Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today Show How Far American Educational Standards Have Declined

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BY JASON W. STEVENS

There’s a delightful and true saying, often attributed to Joseph Sobran, that in a hundred years, we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.

Now comes even more evidence of the steady decline of American educational standards.

Last year, Annie Holmquist, a blogger for better-ed.org, discovered a 1908 curriculum manual in the Minnesota Historical Society archives that included detailed reading lists for various grade levels.

According to her research, the recommended literature list for 7th and 8th graders in Minnesota in 1908included the following:

https://www.thefederalistpapers.org/education-2/middle-school-reading-lists-100-years-ago-vs-today-show-how-far-american-educational-standards-have-declined

3 thoughts on “Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today Show How Far American Educational Standards Have Declined

  1. Reading lists in the 1950s included many classics too.

    Internet learning can be done in one year of high school and save taxpayers a lot of money. Electronic learning through Internet is pure junk.

  2. One of the major problems is that the teachers in K-12 are often unable to write properly themselves. I cannot begin to count the number of times I received notices from a teacher with grammar, usage, and spelling errors. It is also commonplace that they do not correct errors in the students’ papers – I would be so incredulous when my child’s homework and papers would be returned, graded, without any language errors being corrected or even circled. I admit I feared pointing this out to the teachers or the principals, as I did not want my child to be the victim of any retribution. And yes, I am talking about Ridgewood, and yes, I experienced all 13 grades and found these problems scattered throughout. There is so much emphasis on having fun and doing all kinds of really cool stuff like space week and such, but this comes at the expense of diagramming sentences and learning proper spelling. And the kids take Mandarin Chinese and Psychology but they don’t have to take World, American, and Ancient history.

  3. We’ve been through this.

    Before women were allowed to participate in the real economy, the one profession that was open to them was teaching. So, because of sexual discrimination, we had a plethora of highly qualified intellectuals education our 7th graders.

    Nowadays, the cream of that crop will instead run for office, open a practice, or become CEO of Yahoo, for example. Whet’s left behind are the B student education majors at Montclair State, for example. They are teaching the kids now.

    What do? It is unfair to force, through discrimination, highly qualified intellects into low paying jobs. That ended with the sexual revolution. It is impractical to raise the salary of a high school math teacher to $100,000.

    My suggestion would be to encourage people in the private sector who are within 10-15 years of retirement to consider a short career in education. Bring that worldly knowledge to the classroom for a few years. Wouldn’t work for everyone, but some people might enjoy the summers off, and the energy one can get from sharing ideas that are new to the other parties. I’d rather have a semi retired engineer or businessperson teaching my kid than a jaded teacher who has known no other professional life (though to be fair, some professional teachers are very, very good at what they do)

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