I think that test you discovered has been found to be bogus. I sincerely doubt 99% of the schoolkids of that time period could have passed that test. I’ll reiterate: few kids from the 1800s went to school. Most kids were needed at home to help on the farm.
If you go to Snopes the first thing you see in red letters is FALSE.
But then if you go all the way through the long explanation, you'll see Snopes NEVER says the test itself isn't real, in fact you'll see it verbatim there.
What Snopes claims is false is the premis that 1895 students were better educated than modern ones, as these were specific questions of the era and things like art weren't included.
Admittedly, I was lazy just searching for this test and using it as an example.
It was faster and easier than digging into my considerable library of 1800s texts and hand typing in a test.
You would be amazed at the quizzes and tests scattered throughout the school books of that era and the level of knowledge required.
For instance, about any 5th grade math book of the era teaches how to generate, read and interpret a P&L statement. As most math teachers today what a P&L statement is. Good luck
Your partly and mostly right.
Few kids went to school for long would be a better way of putting it. Many quit by the end of 5th grade.
That's why P&L statements and much other knowledge needed to run a family farm business was taught by the 5th grade level. Not all of running a farm is shoveling crap and milking cows, haying etc. A great deal of it is dealing with the financials and measurement, breeding and genetics, etc. There's a LOT more to it than most folks know, especially if you have a SUCCESSFUL farm.
As a genealogy nut I spend a LOT of time looking at cunsus data from 1850 on up.
Most kids were listed as "at school" at least to 5th grade, and a larger amount than I (or you) would have thought up to 8th grade.