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Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869?
erfnet writes "The New York Times remembers back to when 'college was a buyer's bazaar' and digs up 19th-century classified ads from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and others. In competitive efforts to attract students from the limited pool of qualified candidates, applications were taken as late as September for an October freshman class. Vassar offered lush room accommodations. The expectations were high: Latin, Greek, Virgil, Caesar's Commentaries; Harvard's entrance exam from 1869 is posted (PDF). Could any of us pass the exam today?"
True, the ink stamp on the documents is 1899, which is likely to be the date they were added to the Harvard library. You will note it is stamped on top of the content on each page and is clearly not part of the original page.
However, at the bottom of each page it gives the date as 1869. This date appears to be part of the original page.
Apparently you failed to read each page completely. One fundamental rule of all examinations: read the questions fully. That hasn't changed.
If your idea is that the average person alive today -- never mind the average high school student -- has any knowledge at all of relativistic mechanics, evolutionary biology, computer science/engineering, medical science, etc., I think you'll find you're sadly mistaken. Yes, the average teenager knows how to use a cell phone. Clearly this is an insurmountable obstacle, and Isaac Newton himself would be unable to figure out my Nokia.
At any rate, the material on the "arithmetic" and "algebra" sections is still taught and used in schools today, and I'll outright guarantee you that if I printed those out and took them to a Calculus III section at the local university I'd be unlikely to get a very high pass rate, despite the fact that most of them have memorized how to take dozens of integrals or apply Lagrange multipliers.
Knowledge isn't worth as much as people seem to think; at its heart, it's just trivia. What matters is the ability to think, and that doesn't change from generation to generation.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
PROTIP: Latin America does not speak Latin.
Just some more info to aid metlin, "liberal arts" comes from Latin "artes liberales," literally the "freeing arts." Up until very recently, these included science. The modern definition (at least in the USA) of liberal arts is art, music, literature, language, social sciences, and history. That's a horribly lacking bunch. I spent almost two years as an engineering major before switching to a "liberal arts" degree and I feel I am only just barely well-rounded because of my strengths in math and science.
OT: That inscription is CREEPY, if you know all the symbolism behind it.
All the other cathedrals are expressions of some sort of artistry, or aspiration to heaven, or whatever.
St. Peter's is this imposing thing that says I am the Pope; I am the most powerful man on Earth; do as I say or suffer the consequences. And then there's that inscription -- "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church", said by Jesus, for those who don't know the Latin -- inscribed above the canopy where only the Pope can say Mass, as if to say "I am Peter's descendant as Pope, and Peter is Jesus' successor, so to slight me is to slight Jesus, so do what I say!"
This is a minor point, but Shakespeare and the King James Bible aren't Middle English; they're Early Modern English from the early 1600's. They are almost completely recognizable to a speaker of modern English, especially once the "thou/you" distinction is explained, and with the occasional vocabulary word. For an example of Middle English, the best known example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late 1300's), http://www.librarius.com/cantales/genpro.htm. That's significantly more difficult to understand, though if you sound it out, and read about the rules of grammar, it doesn't take too much practice before you can read it without trouble.
But you're right, the big change was from Old English, which was a Germanic language that is far more intelligible to modern German speakers than modern English speakers. Our current language is highly influenced by the importation of French and Latin words after the Norman invasion of 1066.