Please go to #20 to see the Kansas 8th grade test given in 1895.
Don’t be thrown by the arcane measurements, [rods, bushels etc.] as they had been taught to the Kansas farm kids all along.
The rest of the test [English, geography, history, etc] is just as depressing, comparing how far standards have sunk in a century and a quarter.
It was not then so remarkable that 2 Ohio bicycle shop owners invented the airplane, tested wing profiles in a home-made wind tunnel, designed their own aluminum-block ICE engine, etc.
Their 1890s high school educations were more rigorous than college today.
Students of the late 1800s wouldn’t know what a microsecond, a coulomb, or a giga-byte happens to be either. Hand them a DVD and they wouldn’t have a clue what it does. I never used a peck or a bushel or a rod in any work I have done. Times change and so does the necessary knowledge base.