William Marvel: Finals in Kansas, 1895

For years now, an 1895 eighth-grade graduation examination has been circulating around the internet. Newspapers occasionally poach it for editorial ammunition or amusing filler, and in this era of immediate reader response, the reaction is often vitriolic.

The test was given to students in Saline County, Kansas, on April 13, 1895. The questions covered grammar, arithmetic, U.S. history, orthography, geography and physiology, leaning heavily toward agricultural relevance. Under physiology, the student was expected to know how to stop bleeding if an artery were lacerated — a good skill to have in farm country. Simple arithmetic questions included how much a 3,942-pound load of wheat would be worth at 50 cents a bushel, deducting 1050 pounds for tare. That required knowing what “tare” was — which I didn’t, until the Kansas native across my breakfast table told me. (It means the weight of an unladen container.) Then one had to be able to convert wheat from pounds to bushels; another problem involved calculating the cubic feet in a load of wheat and transforming that, too, into bushels. Several geography questions were related to weather, which they have altogether too much of in Kansas.