Thank you. You said it much better than I. I suspected that the piece could very well be a slanted attempt to make our current educational system appear lacking. Having worked in higher education for over 30 years and watched the quality of high school graduates decline I just natually tended to accept the article as true.
The other site claiming to “debunk” it admits that it is a genuine test, but questions whether it was an eighth grade test.
I’m not “all” that old, but I remember the kinds of things we studied in the first eight years of school, and it corresponds neatly to what is on this test. Lots of geography, lots of arithmetic problems. This exam isn’t that different from what we might have seen in the sixth grade, actually.
Go back a few years before the date of this test, and things were tougher yet. You’ll remember that at one time everyone had to have latin and greek before they could think about going to college. At college they would get more latin and greek and hebrew too.