Why did the expectations from education shrink so immense?

>>1833876
My guess is that with mass education there is no way to teach everyone to be second Newton.

>>1833876
Egalitarianism. There's not much more to it.

>>1833876
How many languages are you fluent in, op?

>>1833896
Kurdish, German, English, once spanish, but steadily declining because only important for nothing beside music and impressing girls, learning turkish, can read and write with two script systems

>>1833884
Then those who can't, fail.

>>1833876


Because out here in the real world, we actually have more intensive education, just not in the field of languages.

Macauley's 12 year olds should be able to

>Write
>Do arithmetic
>Second langauge (Latin) Grammar)
>Geography
>French, but not formal french, just exposure to French speaking people
>Basic physics (whatever that means)

At least when I went to school, by the time we were 12, we had

>Reading and writing in primary language
>Arithmetic
>Geometry
>Algebra
>Geography
>Systematic history, divided into our own country and that of the rest of the world.
>Civic education and social structure
>A second language (Spanish in my case, but there was a choice of some)
>Biology
>Physics
>Chemistry
>Astronomy (Admittedly, none of the sciences at a very proficient level)
>Practical construction courses, woodshop and the like
>Computer usage


And then, as we matured up till 18, we added stuff like calculus, trigonometry, much more advanced sciences; including crap that nobody knew in the 18th century like atomic modeling, more practical courses, basic programming, etc.

Languages got left by the wayside to make room for other skills. And even for stuff that was known to some in her time, I'd be interested in how many of say, Macauley's 18 year old students would know what a double replacement chemical reaction was, or how to test for it.

>>1833979
this.

Macaulay's list of things looks massive, but when you break it down, you realize today's kids could learn these things in 1 year where it would take his 4. These seem like advanced concepts they're teaching, but to their standard students, it was just memorizing some fancy dead people quotes.

Today's mathematics and science courses are more expansive than theirs in order to prepare for higher level than they would go. This pretty much is true for all of our courses. We spend a lot of time on our building blocks because our education will reach further than theirs will.

>>1833979
>>1834386

I'm sure that youare right, I had this in mind.
Even my teacher told me, that his education included 30% less than what we get teached today. Anyway, historical persons seem to be much more successfull, whereas we still struggle to place some punctuation marks correctly.

Maybe I'm just biased or so.

here is the rest of the text, if anyone is interested.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/catharine-macaulay/#ThoEdu

>>1835209
>Even my teacher told me, that his education included 30% less than what we get teached today. Anyway, historical persons seem to be much more successfull, whereas we still struggle to place some punctuation marks correctly.


You've got enormous sampling bias in there; semi-literate scrawling isn't usually as well preserved as the best of the best. But you still have some idiotic scribbling, usually preserved in the form of graffiti.