Our family homestead in Western NY has collected “stuff” since it was built in 1830. There are books there from the mid-1800s, some of which are school textbooks. My husband, a Physicist, is shocked at the sixth grade math books. What sixth graders then were required to know is material not found in high school at all. Ditto for grammar and literature.
The overall dumbing down of America’s kids is going to help Obama and his ilk to create a dependent socialist society. Very sad.
Simon Newcombe’s father was an itinerant teacher in Nova Scotia in the 19th Century. Newcombe was resentful that his father would not teach him mathematics, especially algebra. Newcombe went on become the director of the US Naval Observatory, and probably the most famous scientist in America. Later in life, he received a letter from his father showing that he did not know how to solve two simultaneous linear equations.
The textbooks may have been challenging, the teachers were not always up to the challenge. I wouldn’t overly romanticize the good old days. I graduated from high school in 1968, the year that SAT peaked (and I had high SAT scores) but, in retrospect, I believe that I had only one even competent high school mathematics teacher.