Can you answer the following questions?
- Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
- What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of lie, play and run.
- Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
- A wagon box is 2 feet deep, 10 feet long, and 3 feet wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
- Find the interest of $512.60 for eight months and 18 days at 7%.
- Write a bank check, a promissory note and a receipt.
- Give the epochs into which U.S. history is divided.
- Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
- What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
- Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
These are 10 of 47 questions from an eighth grade exit exam from 1895.
People today say, “Gee, my great-grandfather was a really smart guy, considering that he only had an eighth grade education.” What they fail to realize is that eighth grade was the end of the line for most people. It was the equivalent of 12th grade today.
Generations ago, students learned what was necessary to know to be successful in life, and that included learning how to grow their own crops and work on their own cars, as well as how to balance a checkbook.
Your great-grandparents’ eighth grade education included a particular emphasis on civics and government structure; your great-grandpa likely knew more about the Constitution than you do.
My, how things have changed.
In my opinion, the most destructive thing that the administration of President Jimmy Carter did was create the federal Department of Education in 1980. According to Business Insider, the U.S. ranked 38th in math scores and 24th in science in 2018 for high schoolers, though it ranks No. 1 globally for its university educational system, according to U.S. News Best Rankings for Education survey in 2023.
So what happened?
The Department of Education became a massive bureaucracy with an annual budget of $68 billion, and over the last 44 years, educational priorities flipped. What were once considered critical learning areas were knocked to the bottom of the heap and replaced with things like advanced calculus, a math skill hardly anyone but astronomers and rocket scientist’s need.
History and civics were once considered to be important components of education, but the DOE bureaucrats felt otherwise and reclassified those study areas as non-critical and relaxed the rule that one had to have a master’s degree to teach those courses.
History and civics were dumped into a class called “social studies.”
Rock star Frank Zappa probably said it best:
“Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what’s in it…And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them? And furthermore, if you don’t know what’s in the document, how can you care if someone is shredding it?” Zappa was quoted as saying.
My fifth grade social studies teacher was the gym class teacher, and he did not have a clue about what he was supposed to be teaching. He told the class that U.S. currency was backed by gold.
I raised my hand and responded that my dad told me our money was fiat and that it wasn’t backed by anything.
The teacher actually got mad at my assertion.
Later, I asked dad who was right and his response was, “I can guarantee that if you walk into the bank with a $10 bill and ask it to be transferred into $10 worth of gold, they will laugh at you.”
Years later, my daughter, who was in third or fourth grade at the time, brought home a flier on Benjamin Franklin to study, and it was a slanted “fact sheet” about the founding father being a slave owner.
Yes, Franklin had slaves, six of them to be exact, and it appears they were all part of an extended family, according to the Benjamin Franklin House. However, what is not taught in modern curricula is that Franklin purchased his slaves to protect them.
Franklin’s “slave” Peter was actually his best friend. He went everywhere Franklin went, and the two shared a bed when traveling, as was the custom of the time; Peter was not forced to sleep in the loft over the horse stalls as slaves traditionally did.
Peter was free to leave anytime he wanted, but he chose to be Franklin’s “slave.”
When Peter and his “slave” son traveled with Franklin to England, the younger man wanted to stay rather than sail back to America, and Franklin declared him a free man on the spot.
I wrote on the back of the teacher’s “fact sheet:” Did you know Franklin was the president of the Pennsylvania Abolitionists Society? Why isn’t the fact that he was postmaster general, framer of the Constitution, inventor of the Franklin Stove, lightning rod and bifocals and a benefactor of libraries and fire stations included?
Heck, the fact sheet barely mentioned Poor Richard’s Almanac, but castigated his newspapers for printing wanted slave ads without disclosing that newspapers were legally required to print such ads at that time.
The teacher’s email response to me was, “I have to teach the curriculum I’m given.”
It is important to note that pay disparity, especially between male and female teachers, has long existed, and the pay gap between educators and bureaucrats is enormous.
According to the DOE, the average salary of a bureaucrat with a bachelor’s degree is $137,881, and the average pay for a teacher with a master’s in education is $56,289.
While there are plenty of outstanding teachers who truly love teaching their kids and practice their profession for everything but the love of money, we are beginning to see more and more oddballs with a political agenda making their way into the classroom.
TikTok and Instagram are chocked full of rainbow haired weirdos filming themselves in front of a pride flag and gloating about how they introduce “gender fluidity” to elementary school kids.
Richmond County School Board Trustee Venus Cain is no proponent of charter schools, but she will be the first to admit that home rule does not exist with school boards anymore. They are at the complete mercy of the DOE.
In contrast, charter schools are free to develop their own curriculum as long as they meet basic standards. They are free to offer agricultural classes, financial planning and auto shop if they want without permission from the DOE.
Really, the Carter administration should have faced lawsuits when it created the DOE, as it is a direct violation of the 10th Amendment, in my estimation. The DOE has become such a sacred cow, protected by the powerful teachers unions, that even staunch conservatives won’t dare mention abolishing the bureaucracy.
The only way to get our education back on track is to foster more charter schools.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
