Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I doubt they'd be able to pass a modern test either. These people grew up with a different curriculum than those at the latter half of the 20th century / new millennium.
Ah yes, the education of that day, based on assumptions that are still present in some form today.
Might have been a more refined age, though for today I'm pretty sure your average CS major needs to be able to quote Dante in his original language about as much as he needs an extra heavy bender prior to the big test.
"To circumscribe a circle about a given triangle."
I fail.
I wonder if they were allowed to use calculators?
Man, if the examiner had been smart he'd written page 3-4 in LaTeX and saved himself a lot of handwriting!!!!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then. Plus much of the scientific knowledge in 1869 were available exclusively in Latin, hence the emphasis on the "dead language".
Could any of us pass the exam today?
Well, the theory of relativity, evolution, anything about computers, most modern medicine, etc., would be straight out because they didn't exist then. And I doubt many people here would disagree that knowing how to use a computer and a basic understanding of physics something every college would want in its students. It's no use trying to test ourselves according to the standards of over a hundred years ago... we know so much more about the world it's not even fair. The smartest person of that era would look like a total idiot today just trying to get by with what we take for granted -- driving a car, using a cell phone, browsing the internet, etc.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I find it hard to believe they had PDF files in 1869.
Could a Harvard graduate from the era be able to send an email from a laptop? Would he know how to even turn-on the laptop?
I guess it would all depend on the time scale. If you set a laptop down in front of him(and they were all males back then) and said, "Send me an email in the next 5 minutes stating your name and major" then yes, he would fail. However if you gave him a day and allowed him unlimited access to the laptop then he might be able send one. Critical thinking skills are pretty timeless, and unfortunately seem to be lacking in today's college environments.....
Monstar L
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.
After utterly failing the Latin and Greek sections, I think I'd get a pretty bad reputation with any reviewer, even though I could do the rest just fine with a slide rule. Of course, I could follow up the geometry section with a lovely essay relating the theories of computability, genetics, and medicine, and the reviewer would be equally confused.
The parts that are important in modern innovation are still certainly appropriate for an entrance exam. The only difference I see between this and a modern exam is that the Latin and Greek sections have been replaced by English tests and some basic science questions. After all, the purpose for knowing Latin was that is was supposed to be the universal language of scholars, and during the burst of scientific progress following WWII, English took a firm grasp of that role.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
With the exception of the arithmetic, logarithms and trigonometry, algebra and plane geometry, not a chance in Hell.
Now, how well would a prospective applicant fare with some of today's knowledge? Introductory quantum mechanics can be taught at the high-school level. Now someone out Victorian era and give them the mathematical equations and they would fail due to not having the conceptual foundation to understand it.
Hold onto your seat for the big reveal: Knowledge advances over time, but correspondingly, some knowledge is made obsolescent. How well would any of do at knapping flint knives and spears? You might make a passable one, but not one that would qualify as a quality tool in the Paleolithic era.
Progress, folks. It's a good thing.
What use is Latin and Greek today?
Latin is very important today, especially with respect to the web. Have you tried to come up with a short decent sounding company name that is both trademark-able and has an available .com domain? I found it easier to accomplish with Latin than English, Perpenso.
A lot of the comments so far are of the tack that "Greek and Latin are useless" or "CS majors don't need to quote Dante". I respond that they have no idea what a university education was for over its thousand year history. If you think you only go to university to learn how to write programmes and get a job in an industry, the 19th (and even 12th) century university man would tell you to get an apprenticeship - the early 20th century university man would tell you to go to a technical school.
Greek and Latin are still the most useful languages available for educated speakers of English because they allow you to decode almost any term in the English language, especially technical terms. Quoting Dante's Mediaeval Italian may make you as good a computer scientist as quoting Shakespeare's Elizabethan English, but the you will also be just as cultured - and I don't think anyone who understands what a university is for can claim that a cultured CS (all other things notwithstanding) is worse than an uncultured one.
To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then.
Do you really believe that?
Plus much of the scientific knowledge in 1869 were available exclusively in Latin, hence the emphasis on the "dead language".
1869 not 1689.
PROTIP: Latin America does not speak Latin.
"To circumscribe a circle about a given triangle."
locate the center-point of each leg of the triangle with a compass, and plot a line perpendicular to each, thus locating the center of the triangle at the intersection of these lines. Then, use the compass to plot the circle the center-point of the circle being the same as that of the triangle, and the radius of the circle being the distance from that pont to a Vertex of the triangle. beginning at any Vertex of the triangle, circumscribe the circle about the triangle, returning to the same vertex the circle began on.
more or less. its a word problem, with a word answer, perhaps a diagram would be expected to be drawn along with the answer.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
I'm two weeks away from a master's degree in Ancient Greek. I'm not sure I'd pass the Greek portion of the exam. Why? Because it focuses on extremely rigorous memorization of obscure details (and I'm talking obscure details of an arcane dead language, mind you). I can read even difficult Greek pretty well, but that doesn't mean I can decline 'trirs' (a noun in a highly unusual declension), or form the correctly-accented participles of 'histmi', or decline much of anything in the unusual dual number, off the top of my head and without consulting a grammar. Nor, I think, could most of my colleagues. The translation *into* Greek, however, is quite easy. It's a hard test for college freshmen, to be sure, but it's also testing based on a very different sort of educational objective. Passing the Greek section requires more memorization than actual competence in the language.
Translation:
1. Me non refero quam divitem esse Gygen. (Unsure how to decline 'Gyges' but we'll go with that for accusative. I guess it's a Greek paradigm.)
2. Quis clarior Graeciae quam Themostecles? Quis, cum in exilium expelleretur, injuriam suae patriae ingratae non tulit, sed idem quod ante viginti annos Coriolanus fecisset?
3. Primo veris venit consul ad Ephesum, et militibus ab Scipio acceptis apud milites contionem habuit, in qua, virtute sua collaudata, adhortabatur ad novum bellum cum Gallis suspicandum, qui (ut inquit) Antiochum auxiliis iuverunt. (I left in 'ut inquit' and 'in qua' although they were meant to be omitted. I wondered if the last bit should be infinitive/accusative construction due to indirect speech, however I think 'ut' demands the indicative.)
Grammar:
You could copy this out of Wheelock so I don't see the point of reproducing it here.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
If they don't need the knowledge, then forcing them to memorize it (which they would likely soon forget due to the fact that it isn't important to them) would be rather useless and counterproductive, would it not? I'd say some of the more advanced math classes should indeed be optional because many people won't really use the knowledge.
I would not advocate that everyone take college prep math classes. What I would advocate is that everyone take some sort of math class. Schools should have two math tracks, college prep and practical/vocational, and a student should be taking classes in one or the other. This is not an original idea, I'm basically describing what my grandmother told me about HS in her day. The practical/vocational classes included things like balancing a checkbook, calculating interest on a loan, calculating a bill with credits and discounts, calculating your paycheck given overtime and sunday pay, area and volume calculations you might use in the home or on the farm, fraction based calculations you might use as a carpenter, machinist or cook, etc.
I realize that there are spreadsheets, apps, etc for many of these things but in learning how to do these calculations yourself you also learn the mechanics of modern society. If more people had had such practical/vocational math when in HS then perhaps adjustable rate mortgages would not have been such a mystery?
Let's see... 1869?
Oh, that just leaves classical mechanics, much of calculus, much of linear algebra, some thermodynamics, some electromagnetism (I won't blame them for not thinking about Maxwell's equations, which were introduced just 8 years prior and were rather obscure in their time)... Could go on.
Nah, it's not that there wasn't a whole lot of science at the end of the XIXth century, it's just that much of the science was done after you'd get in the university. You didn't have baseline education much farther than elementary school back then (or a sort of equivalent, with languages and "humanities" being more developed usually), it was straight to university afterwards (I believe entrance age was earlier than it is now, too, but I'm not a historian). You would be expected to be able to talk, write and calculate, but not so much be half a scientific already like it is now.
I would argue that university is a lot tougher than it has been, though, what with sciences growing over time. I mean, nowadays quantum mechanics and wave-particle duality are part of the common curriculum in a physics degree, and quantum field theory is an almost obligatory passage in a Master's. Mere decades ago this would've been left to postgrads, if taught at all.
Two things bear heavily on the difficulty of being admitted to a school:
1) The reputation of the school at the time of application.
2) The pool of qualified students with the means to attend.
1869 was a time when most people in the US made their living through manual labor or subsistence farming. Neither occupation offers the means or the motivation for higher education.
And I have to wonder just how prestigious the Ivy League schools were in 1869. This was just 90 years after the revolution. I expect that "schooled in Europe" carried more weight than any kind of degree from Harvard. What did it take to get into Cambridge in 1869?
The reason for Latin and Greek being required is that it was believed up until sometime in the 20th that knowing those languages in particular would make a person smarter. Basically the brain would grow strong by having to contort to handle those languages.
We know now, that it's not really the case that the benefits of learning Latin or Greek are not inherent to either of those languages anymore than any other languages a person might learn beyond the first.
If anything, higher formal education is less important now than it was in years gone by. Today, the complex, information based, place we live in allows one to learn about anything on demand, in seconds. Unless your interests are purely academic, you don't need the full background of a given study crammed into a short time period to solve problems in the real world. Like someone commented earlier, knowledge is just trivia; being able to think is all that matters.
What really happened is that the universities found the appeal in money. More students equals more income. The lure of higher incomes advertised on false premises attracted people in droves. One of the best marketing campaigns to date, in my opinion.
University is a fantastic place for one to pursue their passions in the study of a given topic, but to say more schooling is needed to survive outside of academia seems a little misguided. I do agree that you can never stop learning; if university is the only place you can learn, more power to you.
To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then.
There was a lot of incredibly important science going on back then. It just wasn't in the same areas as now, and it wasn't expected to be studied heavily before college.
To give a taste of what was going on scientifically:
* Biology was in the middle of radical developments, as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was getting developed, while Gregor Mendel's was quietly developing genetics.
* In geography, there had recently been the establishment of the Prime Meridian going through Greenwich and international efforts underway to standardize longitude.
* The metric system was spreading throughout Europe, in part because of Napoleon, but also in part because it was easier to work with than the alternatives.
* A couple of decades earlier Charles Babbage had built the first thing that could reasonably be called a computer, and Ada Lovelace was kinda programming it.
* Louis Pasteur was improving vastly on the understanding of microorganisms and vaccination.
* Claude Bernard proposed and described what is now known as the scientific method.
* In economics, there were lots of new ideas floating around, with Karl Marx forming the ideas of communism, while Carl Menger was forming the basis of the Austrian School.
Now, there was definitely different emphasis: Anyone who was expecting to be an educated person had to know Latin, Greek, and probably French. Many were trying to enter the clergy, so there was more emphasis on religious matters than there is today. But to say that this was a period of scientific stagnation would just be flat wrong, given that there were a lot of major discoveries going on right around this time of the sorts of principles that we now take for granted.
I am officially gone from
But the point is, TFA is bull, the curricula is irrelevant, we are not smarter or stupider today than 142 years ago.
Actually, the data seems to show that the average IQ has increased quite a bit since then. Of course, this is probably due to the increase in abstract thinking abilities amongst the populace on the lower end of the scale, but it certainly does suggest that, as a people, we are more intelligent today than 142 years ago.
surely the vast majority of Harvard applicants would fail this test. Greek and Latin or quite depreciated. Simply replace those languages with equivalent questions in relevant modern languages or subjects.
One strong point of modern college is that language classes have be depreciated for fields they have no bearing. A robotics or CS major will have zero use for latin or greek or really any language other than english.
On the other hand, Latin is an immensely useful language if you are planning a major in any romance language. Latin Italian but knowing Latin gets you Italian at an 80% discount, Spanish at 70% and French at 60% . Its learning 4 languages for the price of 2. Greek is pretty much useless in this regard, not many languages have a Greek base that isn't already covered by greek>latin loan words.
As other people have mentioned, some of the exam was politically driven. It had some ulterior motive built in to exclude those of a lesser social class. Sure, greek and latin had more value in education at that time but not so much that a business degree required such knowledge, especially greek.
When did you stop beating your wife?
What is the proper answer?
I managed to reach 5th grade without knowing how to "properly" divide, when by the school's standards at the time I attended elementary school, I should have been able master it by 4th grade. I managed by sequential subtraction to arrive at the right answer. But again, I never had to take group theory or elementary statistics in 12th grade like my children did.
TFA is bunk. Are multiple-choice exams killing intellectual progress? Is it better to know how to find something in the Internet than knowing what Virgil wrote about? Should I had been sent back to 4th grade because I could arrive at the answer only thru the long around when dividing one number by another? Or should I have been allowed to continue to 6th grade and take remedial lessons? (Actually that is what happened, and today, some 40 years later, I'm a successful IT manager, dealing day-to-day with technical issues beyond the comprehension of my employers? )
There is no way to actually measure and compare today's entrance exams to those 140 years ago, so again, there is no point. The brilliant student of 140 years ago, time-machine moved to today, would seem stupid because of his ignorance of everyday stuff. Would he do better then than today, given a few years of education? Who can tell? Maybe his best skill was buying slaves at good prices, which today would be useless.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
At my high school in Mexico City we had an old teacher who taught Greek & Latin, he was considered quite an erudite, Also I'm pretty sure that greek & latin ARE required for any recognized highschool in Mexico, (then again maybe the whole education system needs to be modernized in Mexico), of course it was just one class, and with one class we never got the knowledge needed to solve this exam.. I'm glad I can at least read the words and understand the general meaning.
Or as a human race we are more attuned to solving the kinds of problems presented by standard IQ tests. We probably have lost skills in other areas that we no longer know how to test.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Also, Biology including evolution, Astronomy, Chemistry; Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus; Computer programming; Print shop, metal shop, and actual knowledge about health. If you want to see more of that and less "social engineering", then more money should be put into them.
The US spending per student is already comparable to the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Israel, etc. Perhaps the problem is not the current spending level but how/where it is being spent?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.PRIM.PC.ZS/countries/1W?display=default
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.
Don't forget that many English words are derived from Latin and Greek words or stems. Learning both of those languages effectively expands your English vocabulary.
Better nutrition, especially during early childhood, is probably a bigger factor. Studies have shown that kids who go hungry in the first 5 or so years of life tend to score markedly below those that do not.
Monstar L
English | Geometry | Algebra | Arithmetic
No Latin or Greek...
I think the whole thing speaks volumes to the disconnect between academia and reality.
Your post, and the fact that you are rated as "insightful" speaks volumes to the shift that has occurred. Your statement, and the rest of your post, where you claim that "...an education in the high points of historical philosophy might be of limited use..." speak volumes of a profound poverty of mind, where education and the search for truth is predicated in material gain. This intellectual poverty forms us into individual intellectual islands floating through time, neither looking backwards nor forwards. We are separated from the origins of our society, our culture, our values. We forget that our society was modelled after ancient Greece. Ideas such as private property, money, justice, freedom of speech, constitutional government all come from ancient Greece, and were refined and developed by the Romans (at least during certain periods of Roman history).
Before you write off classical education, read Plato's "The Apology", where you start to see the beginnings of the ethical underpinnings of our modern world. Read Plato's Gorgias, where Socrates carries on a debate about many issues that still rings true today. See if you can see in this quote a great summation of the modern field of advertising and public relations in his statement about "oratory":
Socrates: The same is true about the orator and oratory relative to the other crafts, too, then. Oratory doesn't need to have any knowledge of the state of their subject matters; it only needs to have discovered some device to produce persuasion in order to make itself appear to those who don't have knowledge that it knows more than those who actually do have it. Plato - Gorgias - 459c
Reading the first volume of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" has given me a great appreciation for how civilizations develop and change, and about how valuable our current stable democratic systems are. When you look at long succession of Roman emperors who were all removed by various methods of murder, you start to realize the value of electing leaders.
When you speak of the "disconnect between academia and reality", I think you minimize the work of centuries of great thinkers. When you look at the world logically, you begin to realize that it is very strange. You start to realize your own limitations. It gives you a sense of humility, both for yourself and for the poor sods who think they have figured it all out. You start to realize what pathetic creatures we are, how we weave illusion upon illusion. It is the way we are, and the best we can do is to try to understand the world. However, we should never believe that we have "figured it all out", because when we do that, we effectively stop thinking. Socrates said that "as for me, all I know is that I know nothing". He spent his life questioning and seeking knowledge, but he always remembered his limitations.
Education cannot simply be about utility. It has to also be about making us more complete as human beings. It should help us in our search for wisdom and truth in the world. Socrates said that "the unconsidered life is not worth living." When you do not consider the purpose and meaning of your own life, you become a football, being kicked around in someone else's game.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I admit, I struggled a bit with the polynomials as I don't work much with them anymore, I still don't see any direct application for them even after years of working in scientific computing. Therefore, I see them as a graduation test only, meaning "If we can force you to learn this, then we can force you to learn anything.".
Just for that you fail the exam.
Predictably, half the comments here reply, "Oh, wow, this test is easy except the Latin/Greek because that's not important!"
Well, bullshit on all counts.
(1) The purpose of learning Latin and ancient Greek is not to enable you to speak Latin and ancient Greek. They've already been dead languages for millennia and they were arguably even more dead then (Greece being even less relevant). It's an exercise in the study of language and of foundations of European culture and literature. You don't get the same experience by learning "Japanese for anime fans".
Anyway, I "aced" Latin at school - that sort of thing was something I enjoyed and came reasonably naturally. Many years later, I have forgotten enough of it that I could not do a good job of these questions. The translations into Latin would today leave me hopeless without a dictionary. What is more, these aren't trivial Latin beginner questions.
(2) History/geography - at least some people are admitting that they don't know some of these, though I see a lot of "oh about half". Really? Did you actually sit down with that sheet and no references and write detailed geographical and historical answers? Did you then go one by one checking at the end that they were all correct? Or did you just think "oh yeah I've heard of that before" and sneak in a "check" to Wikipedia, confirming knowledge you didn't really have to mind?
The subject of my masters thesis was the history of an area of mathematics; background reading required me to be familiar with specific areas of classical Greek and Roman history. I enjoyed History at high school, though none of it was classical. Latin class included a certain amount of Roman history surrounding Pliny the Younger and Virgil, with an earlier school covering the historical context of the Odyssey and the Iliad. And yet I don't think I could do justice to any of the essay-type questions. "Pericles - the Man and his Policy" - really? Are even a significant minority claiming they even know more than a sentence or two about Pericles?
(3) The maths section. Oh, what a surprise, everyone is claiming that the maths section is trivial. Well, bullshit again. I have a postgrad mathematical education and, yes, I can probably answer these questions. But I would have to think about the plane geometry proofs (which, it is likely, the candidate would be expected to have simply memorised for this test) - I can't recite all of them off the top of my head and I bet I'd stumble on some details for some of them if I were to actually write the answers all out rather than just wave my hand over the paper dismissively and say "this is easy".
What is more, you annoying geeks, there were no electronic calculators in the mid-19th century. You know what this means? It means that half the challenge is doing the arithmetic quickly and without mistakes. And, whether by reading original Leibniz or the speling errors on /., there is one reassuring thing I have come to know (I am reassured because I do it myself and thought I was the only one): numerate geeky types make lots of trivial mistakes. A good mathematician - perhaps the sort who is intuitively familiar with geometry - might make a bad doctor or accountant, i.e. may fail in a profession where speed and accuracy with numbers is important.
Whenever I visit Slashdot and there's a topic where people have the chance to put their knowledge to the test, I always see a huge number of people claiming that they did wonderfully at the test. And yet, in real life, hardly anyone ever performs at such superheroic levels, whether dumb, average or intelligent. This isn't because /. isn't full of super-geniuses - even though it isn't - it's because the sheer amount of information accessible in the world today means that everyone necessarily specialises a great deal. No particular random test which has not been prepared for is likely to fit the knowledge of a random sample of even fairly bright individuals.
I guess it's just a predictabl
I did three years of latin at school, from age 11-14 (in the UK), although no greek. I'd say it was one of the more useful subjects that I learned. When I learn any romance language, it's relatively easy to pick up words because I can understand their derivations, so I can often guess the correct meaning for new works that I encounter. Latin lessons also had a far more formal treatment of grammar than English (or French or German) lessons, which was useful both for learning to write correct English and when I went on to study the design of programming languages.
Of all of the subjects that I learned at school, Latin is the only one where I ever find myself wishing I'd paid more attention in class.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You haven't heard from *all* the drop-outs, have you? And many of the people who didn't drop out, but stayed in the system a little too long, are guilty of the converse Kool-Aid.
There have been an increasingly dire series of reports that many (expensive) post-graduate degree mills are steering their studious lemmings over a career cliff.
This as it becomes increasingly unclear why a person needs to pay big money for higher education in a world where it's hard to think up anything you can't find out about in 30 seconds or half an hour.
If I had stuck it out in math class and learned how to do the Laplace transform and other manipulations of the s-domain, it would have saved me a phone call or two to other people who stuck it out in math class. And even without the training, I can fill in the blanks cook-book style, and I have a pretty good idea what the s operator is all about. I'd be hard pressed to improvise, but how many people out there would you trust to improvise on the subject of analog filter design?
I'd also like to figure out the structure of the electromagnetic field in our measurement product, but none of the people I know who stuck it out in math/physics class can do it any better than I can. If we're determined to know the answer, we're going to have to use an electromagnetic field simulator.
Here's an example of the knuckle cracking involved just to warm up to the problem:
The Velocity Factor of an Insulated Two-Wire Transmission Line
But I'm sure Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse could scribble out the answer free hand on the back of his entrance exam, because it occurred to him while proving that "circles are to each other as the squares of their radii" that he had never constructed a Sierpinski curve that carpets the unit circle, and that lead to other things.
In my initial survey of computational options, I discovered MEEP, under the GPL, from MIT. Scheme/C++/Python front ends. I can do all that. Correctly setting up temperature and frequency dependent complex permitivities in several different bulk materials, and not missing out a crucial factor of 1/2 pi somewhere, I'd really want to have someone "educated" to check my work. On that little DIY proposition, I think just opening the box is a three day exercise. With another six years of formal math education, I could maybe even contribute some patches.
Kenneth Arrow
I quote this all the time. And this is old school, already. I'm amazed at the resilience of mass pyramid schemes in the modern workforce. It works this way in pro sports. For every four kids with the talent to "make it big", three drop out due to injury, bad timing, or circumstance with little to show for it, while the kid who makes tenure with the big club reaps huge rewards; not even counting the untold hours invested by kids who dropped out far earlier in the process. The same evolution is taking place in academia these days: $30,000/year as a post-doc shifting test-tubes in some dank over-lit basement. Sign me up.
In the post-Arrow world, the relationship of education to knowledge or common sense is becoming ever more tenuous. I think Temple Grandin has been underemployed in modern curriculum design. On a bad day it feels like the fundamental economic output of the modern labour force is income disparity.
Gone are the days, it seems, that one could get by having the skills and personality to make a positive contribution to the world around us. Yet the opportunity to contribute, as gated by the availability of the core knowledge, has never been greater.
What the world needs is a way for bright kids to drop out of the overpriced educational treadmill without being suspected of having a chip on their shoulder. Or educated voters who give a damn, but the second item seems out of reach. (Is it just myth that back when education was rare, presidents spoke inte